Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance ― Representing Rough Rebels

Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels serves as a corrective supplement to the extant, director-centric history of American cinema's most lauded period. In contrast to star studies that showcase disparate performances, this book focuses on a specific time and place – Hollywood in the crucible, formative years from 1968 through 1971 – and offers close analysis of star actors' deterministic influences over nine of the era's most hallowed films. By examining film reviews and 'star press' from the national magazines whose covers they then dominated, Smith-Rowsey shows how three emergent 'Rough Rebels' – Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Elliott Gould – were understood and contextualized as the best possible responses to Hollywood's twin crises of capital and creativity. As a summary, Hoffman, Nicholson, and Gould, as well as their peers and successors, were positioned and received as absurdist, ironic, and dismissive toward women, and these qualities cast a wide shadow over both their films and much Hollywood cinema in the following decades.

Daniel Smith-Rowsey teaches cinema at Folsom Lake College in California, USA. His feature film Fish Chips and Mushy Peas debuted at the Awareness Festival in 2012. His essays have been published in Bright Lights Film Journal, Jura Gentium, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, and various collections.