Published in 2009
208 pages
Victoria Sturtevant is an associate professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma. She lives in Norman, OK with her husband, Jim Zeigler, their two kids, and the family dog. She teaches courses on film history, theory, and criticism, including seminars on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the Hollywood musical, gender and media and the Hollywood blacklist. She is currently hard at work on her next scholarly publication, a book about representations of pregnancy in American film and television. She loves musicals, but she’s always off-key.
What is this book about?
In the first book-length study of Marie Dressler, MGM’s most profitable movie star in the early 1930s, Victoria Sturtevant analyzes Dressler’s use of her body to challenge Hollywood’s standards for leading ladies. At five feet seven inches tall and two hundred pounds, Dressler often played ugly ducklings, old maids, doting mothers, and imperious dowagers. However, her body, her fearless physicality, and her athletic slapstick routines commanded the screen. Sturtevant interprets the meanings of Dressler’s body by looking at her vaudeville career, her transgressive representation of an “unruly” yet sexual body in Emma and Christopher Bean, ideas of the body politic films Politics and Prosperity, and Dressler as a mythic body in Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie
