Peerless: Rouben Mamoulian, Hollywood, and Broadway (Wisconsin Film Studies) - Hardcover

Kurt Jensen (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299348202 ISBN 13: 9780299348205

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

Synopsis

A proud Armenian who claimed a distant link to nobility, born in what was then part of czarist Russia, Rouben Mamoulian (1897–1987) became one of the most astonishing and confounding directors of American film and theater, directing the original stage productions of Porgy and Bess, Carousel, and Oklahoma!, as well as films including Love Me Tonight, Queen Christina, City Streets, and Silk Stockings. He was famously fired from the film version of Porgy and Bess in a dispute over publicity, and quit Cleopatra after arguments over a single scene. His iconoclastic self-confidence was high among the reasons he had a reputation for being unable to compromise.

This frustrating mix of genius and stubbornness, of critical successes and financial flops, has proven challenging for biographers. Any examination of Mamoulian’s life must explore film, theater, and music history, while being conscious of the racial culture in both American society and the world of entertainment during the mid-twentieth century. Kurt Jensen’s magisterial volume, extensively researched and filled with trenchant observations, brings to life this charming, flawed, and fascinating man.

With lived-in details and surprising revelations, Jensen fleshes out the contours of a remarkable life. Drawing upon Mamoulian’s unfinished memoir and voluminous diaries, as well as interviews with the director’s surviving collaborators, he delivers fresh and informative insider stories from seminal productions. Meanwhile, he explores Mamoulian’s aesthetic principles and strategies as manifested in lighting, choreography, and sound design. Jensen reveals Mamoulian’s mercurial confidence and autocratic tendencies at the height of his power, demonstrating how the wellspring of his art contained the seeds of his own destruction. A tour de force, Peerless offers readers a multifaceted, in-depth look at an idiosyncratic genius.

About this title

About the Author

Kurt Jensen has been a film reviewer and news writer for several Catholic publications, and his contributions have been published in Studies in Musical Theatre and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299348202
• ISBN 13: 9780299348205
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352