Description:
Studlar looks at four major Hollywood male stars of the silent era--Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, and Lon Chaney--to illuminate the cultural, ideological, and historical implications of these stars in relation to contemporary debates over changing sexual and social norms.
Review Quotes: In this highly readable and engaging study, Studlar selects four roughly contemporaneous movie idols---Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, Rudolph Valentino, and Lon Chaney---and examines the ways in which they produced masculinity within respective cultural contexts of boy culture, the 'matinee girls' of the late Victorian theater, dance, and freak shows.