Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

opera singer and movie star Mario Lanza (1921–1959)
with Caruso signaled a shift in the ethnic clichésofLatinos
as womanizers, exotic dancers, and gangsters; by contrast,
Lanza’s life and operatic career is integrated into mainstream
American culture. His body, voice, and workingclass
credentials identified Lanza with the regeneration of
the ‘‘American dream,’’ as an exemplification of the power
of ‘‘people’s capitalism’’ touted in ads of the 1950s.
Concomitantly, the biopic began to portray eccentric
literary figures whose scandalous heterosexual and homosexual
behavior had been censored, omitted, or doctored
in earlier forms of the genre (for example, in the 1946
biopic of Cole Porter, Night and Day). Biopics such as
The Bad Lord Byron (1948) depicted the scandalous
heterosexual affairs of the writer, and by 1960, The
Green Carnation (1960), a biopic about Oscar Wilde,
confronted the writer’s homosexuality. Biopics about
transgressive women were not new: Madame Dubarry,
Queen Christina, and The Scarlet Empress, all from the
1930s, had portrayed the lives of ‘‘promiscuous’’ women.
But the postwar biopic was inclined to focus on the
scandalous behavior of less illustrious women, signaling
the fusion of the biopic with the social problem film by
linking marginal behavior to problematic social conditions.
Susan Hayward (1918–1975), whose star image
was associated with a stormy personal life that made
headlines, appeared in two biopics that capitalized on
her bad-girl image and best exemplified the fusion of
genres. I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955) portrayed Lillian
Roth’s alcohol addiction, fall from fame, and personal
recuperation. I Want to Live (1958) depicted ‘‘social
misfit’’ Barbara Graham’s connections to the underworld
and her arrest, trial, and execution for murder; the film’s
tone is sympathetic, with scenes that portray her sexual
encounters with men, her run-ins with the law, and the
injustice of capital punishment. Yield to the Night (1956),
another indictment of capital punishment, was a veiled
story of Ruth Ellis, who was tried and executed for the
murder of her lover. It featured Diana Dors (1931–
1984), another female star identified with a turbulent
and much publicized personal life.
Biopics about deranged, promiscuous, and violent
women (and about homosexuals) survived into the
1980s. Dance with a Stranger (1985), another biopic
about Ruth Ellis, focused on her working-class background,
her struggles to survive economically with her
son as a woman on her own, her exploitation by her
upper-class lover David Blakely and his snobbish friends,
the desperation that led her to shoot and kill Blakely, the
drama of her trial, and her sentence to death by hanging.
Prick Up Your Ears (1987) portrayed the unstable, and
ultimately violent, homosexual relationship of the gifted
playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, which
resulted in Orton’s death. Other biopics portrayed cor-
Biography
ruption in high places (for example, Scandal, 1988). The
tempestuous relationship between the writer T. S. Eliot
with his mentally unstable first wife, Vivian, was dramatized
in Tom and Viv (1994). If these biopics were a form
of social history, they were indicative of the intertextual
character of the biopic as it engaged with the effects of
contemporary politics, the ongoing struggles of the film
industry in the international market, the impact of television
with its endless sensational reportage, and changing
discourses of sexual, national, and gendered identity.
Television offers another opportunity to experiment
with biography. In addition to his 1950 film about St.
Francis, Francesco guillare di deo (Francis, God’s Jester,
1950), which was an antihagiographic treatment of the
saint, Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977) directed for television
TheRisetoPowerofLouisXIV(1966), in which the
king is likened to a theatrical director who transforms social
life into spectacle. Ken Russell (b. 1927), a prolific director
of biographical television programs and films, has also
experimented with the form, in Elgar (1962), The Music
Lovers (1971), Lisztomania (1975), and Valentino (1977).
Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg,
1977) and Marlene (Maximilian Schell, 1983) are other
alternative treatments of biography on film. Using a montage
of clips from films, commentaries and monologues by
various personages, impersonations, fictional figures, cartoons,
documentary footage, allusions to legends, pornography,
and inserts of icons, Hitler is a critical investigation
of the German nation and the media that created Hitler.
The ostensible subject becomes a vehicle for the deconstruction
of the individual ‘‘great man’’ and a depiction of
the legendary sources of his construction. Marlene avoids
images of the dying diva, but through dubbed narration (as
if she were already dead) becomes a meditation on the
biopic and death, on relations between filmmaker and
biographical subject, and on film as history. Similarly, the
Hong Kong film Centre Stage (1991) is an index to contemporary
reconstructions of the biopic in its uses of
Brechtian distancing, its creation of multiple viewing positions,
and its investigative probing of the clichés of public
fame, authenticity, and the conventional biopic’s treatment
of time, narration, memory, and history.
The Hollywood biopic has continued to thrive in the
films of Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), Spike Lee (b. 1957),
and Oliver Stone (b. 1946). Schindler’s List (1993), a
blockbuster biopic and a contribution to the growing
number of films (and works of critical literature) that
memorialize the Holocaust, does not foreground familiar
Nazis (though some are present). Rather, the biopic
follows the fortunes of a benign member of the Nazi
party, Oskar Schindler, a savior of many Jews whose
altruism is the pretext for this elegiac treatment of the
Holocaust. Malcolm X (1992) follows the familiar
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 165