Contesting Tears : The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman

Rating:
Summary: Cavell's WORST book
Review: No, I haven't read them all, but this is a severely disappointing follow-up to Cavell's near-perfect previous volume on Hollywood film, "Pursuits of Happiness" (a collection of essays on, mostly, screwball comedies). Especially given that the idea for the volume is such a great one, foreshadowed in an earlier essay (included here, on "Letter from an Unknown Woman") in which Cavell suggestively drew a connection between Hollywood melodrama and Freud's early work on hysteria as a new way of getting at our author's trademark obsession, epistemological problems as human problems. But what made "Pursuits of Happiness" such a tremendous work of film criticism is that whatever Cavell's pretensions, one always believed that he loved the movies he was writing about. Here that feeling is missing; instead you get the feeling he doesn't understand the point of most of these movies at all, and even (shudder!) that his attitude to the genre is condescending. Well, no critic or philosopher can do everything. A sorry introduction to either Cavell or the great Hollywood genre of the women's picture, which still awaits the kind of exposition that Cavell could have given it, at his best. The two stars are for the excellent essay on "Now, Voyager"; the essay on "Gaslight" is an interesting philosophical read, with very little to do with the film; the essay on "Stella Dallas" should be avoided like the plague.

Rating:
Summary: CAVELL'S BEST BOOK
Review: THE BOOK IS THE CUMULATIVE RESULT OF CAVELL'S REMARKABLE QUEST TO BRING PHILOSOPHY BACK TO THE HUMANITIES.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, certainly, but not the best.
Review: To say that Cavell's prose is challenging is charitable, at best. True, his ideas are solid and any good, insightful work requires effort to understand, but Cavell seems to circle around himself in a rhetorical spiral of namedropping and navel-gazing with an irksome regularity. He frequently explores ill-transitioned tangets with no warning or reason apprent, and the overall read becomes fractured and one is left wondering why. This said, when one can extract the ore of Cavell's reason, it is pure gold. Truly, a mixed bag.