Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films.

Pravadelli sets her analysis apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, she views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency.| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Film Studies 1. The Early Thirties: Modernity, New Women, and the Aesthetic of Attractions 2. Normative Desires and Visual Sobriety: Apogee of the Classical Model 3. The Male Subject of Noir and the Modern Gaze 4. (Dis)Adventures of Female Desire in the 1940s Woman's Film 5. Excess, Spectacle, Sensation: Family Melodrama in the 1950s 6. Performative Bodies and Non-referential Images: Excesses of the Musical Notes Works Cited Index | "Panoramic overviews alternate with convincing close readings of dozens of well-known films. . . . In confronting and developing these classic film texts, Pravadelli has produced her own outstanding reading of Hollywood classical style. Highly Recommended."- Choice

"Veronica Pravadelli looks back at the classical Hollywood cinema with a powerful magnifying glass. What comes into full view are not only new details, but an entire new geography. Trends, dividing lines, stylistic choices, plots, questions of gender, become much clearer. The result is a cutting edge analysis, surprising and convincing."
-Francesco Casetti, author of Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity
"Pravadelli's examination and contextualization of on-screen gender dynamics of the 1930s-1960s makes a valuable contribution to film studies."- Journalism History
| Veronica Pravadelli is a professor of film studies and director of the Center for American Studies at Roma Tre University and a former visiting professor at Brown University. She is the author of several books including Performance, Rewriting, Identity: Chantal Akerman's Postmodern Cinema; Alfred Hitchcock: Notorious; and Le donne del cinema: dive, registe, spettatrici. The Italian edition of Classic Hollywood won two prizes for Best Book in Film Studies.