Overlooking and Looking Over Ida Lupino*

 

 

I know now that where I belong is with myself, knowing that I don’t really belong anywhere. That is the inheritance. . . . You say partially goodbye to one world, partially hello to another and then you write about it. . . . Don’t let anyone tell you who you are.—Tina De Rosa

 

Located in the interstices of ongoing debates concerning the cultural production of ethnicity and the presence and production of women in the film industry, Ida Lupino’s life and career help reshape both categories.[1] The length and variety of this career impresses. First as a film actress; then as a screenwriter, director, and producer of cinema; and finally as an actress and director of television, Lupino’s tenure in Hollywood displays a virtuosity few women or men can claim.[2] And although her acting was appreciated during its heyday[3] and in cinema annals compared to that of her “noir” sister Bette Davis, and even though her efforts as “auteuress” in the male-dominated Hollywood studio system have been recorded and acclaimed in a collection of essays entitled Queen of the ‘B’s: Ida Lupino Behind the Camera pub­lished as recently as Spring 1996, few refer to her Italianness and Lupino’s name is rarely pronounced in the roll call of Italian-American cultural workers, women or men.[4] More than an emblem of the common and historic erasure of women’s cultural produc­tion, this oversight transforms into a rule for reading Lupino’s cinematic oeuvre. At once inside and outside the Hollywood stu­dio system (as an actress she worked chiefly for Warner Brothers and as a producer-director she worked with the “Filmmakers,” a production company she founded in 1948 with her second hus­band, Collier Young, and with Malvin Wald),[5] Ida Lupino is positioned both within and outside the world of Italian-Ameri­can cultural and artistic production. Before exploring the ways in which Lupino’s Emerald/Filmmakers films problematize ethnic assimilation in the 1950s, I will briefly sketch the outlines of the interstitial spaces she occupied.

 

Is She or Isn’t She?

Ida Lupino and Italian Americana

Despite steady work, Lupino’s emargination as a woman filmmaker in Hollywood is indisputable. Even Lupino’s ethnic­ity is at once somehow suspicious and innocuous, the tension be­tween these two polarities forcing her outside the mainstream consideration of Italian Americana.

Born in England in 1918, Lupino considered herself “a limey,”[6] and, apart from her name, did not present herself as Italian in any way. A native English speaker (in fact, we do not know whether she spoke or even understood Italian), Lupino did not identify with a core immigrant struggle, namely, the alienation and disenfranchisement stemming from the difficult and imper­fect acquisition of English. Indeed, Lupino’s British citizenship may have provided her with the patina of aristocracy that it lent Ronald Colman (her 1939 costar of The Light that Failed), Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, and other transplanted “limeys” in Hollywood of the time. But more than rounded tones, her English citizenship yielded a political surety that an Italian surname belied in the 1930s, with questions con­cerning Fascist Italy’s designs ever on the increase. In fact, as a British subject (she arrived in Hollywood in 1933–34 gaining US citizenship only in 1948), Lupino neatly avoided the question of global political alliance in the Second World War; as a Briton, and not the Italian “Lupino” signified, her loyalty to the Allies was less questionable. Moreover, Lupino’s “limey” self-identifi­cation helped locate her within the very ethnic legacy that first created dominant ethnic discourse in colonial America, a dis­course that in turn gave rise to the WASP rubric of entitlement that anyone else bearing the name “Lupino” would have labored longer and harder to attain.[7] The “poor man’s Bette Davis,” indeed.

Perhaps Lupino’s name would be more of an issue had she changed it, anglicizing it in some way. Significantly, she did not. Lupino was a self-identified expatriate “limey”; her under­standing of her name and its identificatory weight would have been conditioned more by British class sensibility than North American disempowerment stemming from ethnic affiliation. In England, “Lupino” had theatrical cachet: her father, Stanley Lupino, was a comedian and film actor, and the family traced its genealogy to the famed family of circus and stage performers, the Grimaldis, resident Britons from at least the middle of the Eigh­teenth Century.[8] Lupino, in fact, placed herself on this historic continuum and considered her work in film “doing what I can to justify my ancestors’ faith in the ultimate destiny of the the­ater” (Whitney 18; cited in Heck-Rabi).

Critic Louise Heck-Rabi describes the “twinned vision of the female sphere” (225) that Lupino brings to the screen in her films, a splitting iterated by Lupino’s own voice as an actor, as it fluctuated between British and American intonations. She did, for example, play a Cockney streetwalker in The Light that Failed, but the clipped speech patterns she adopted for most of her earlier film roles (e.g., High Sierra [Raoul Walsh, 1941], They Drive by Night [Walsh, 1940], Road House [Jean Negu­lesco, 1948], etc.) were vintage American and devoid of brittanic cadence. No doubt Lupino’s trained voice would have betrayed no class trace in her native British-English, though the story of her circus forbears probably differs.[9] In limited fashion, Lupino’s voice signals the slippage between her different national affili­ations, Italian, British, and American. Francine Parker observes that “the split aspect of the female person is the recurring theme running through all of Lupino’s films” (cited in Heck-Rabi 225). If Lupino’s “double-woman . . . symbolizes and embodies the es­sential schizophrenia of woman’s world,” as Parker asserts, then perhaps ethnic identity can be seen to function analogously; whether twinned (as in Italian American) or triangulated (as in Italian, British, and American), it is fundamentally multiple and leads to no essential ethnicity.[10] Perhaps she knew this and lived easily within the seeming contradictions that multiplicity sometimes yields, much as Tina De Rosa observes in the quote that is the epigraph to this essay.

 

Outside Ethnicity’s Wake:

Lupino’s Cinema of Victims and Champions

What is at stake in Lupino’s films is the psyche of the victim. They addressed the wounded soul and traced the slow, painful process of women trying to wrestle with despair and reclaim their lives. Her work is resilient, with a remarkable empathy for the fragile and the heartbroken. It is essential.—Martin Scorsese

That Martin Scorsese should mention nowhere in his pithy, elegiac profile for the New York Times Magazine that Lupino was Italian American is noteworthy and useful. It is remarkable in that Scorsese is probably the filmmaker most routinely in­voked as the demiurge of “Italian American Cinema” (a protean and wily category as vexing as it is sometimes attractive)[11] and might therefore be supposed to know something about the denom­ination. He may, of course, have overlooked mentioning it because Lupino never treated specifically Italian or Italian-American themes.[12] (Save one episode of the Thriller series she directed entitled La Strega that starred Ursula Andress and Alejandro Rey and took place on the Sicilian coast. It aired 15 January 1962.)[13] But perhaps the ease with which one can align the cultural position of being a woman and that of being an immi­grant contributed to Scorsese’s oversight. (Or, more to the point, he may find the category “Italian American” tiresome.) Lupino’s cinema is “essential” but not “essentialist”; her protagonists’ struggles symbolize the struggles of all subjects located beyond the mainstream pale. Lupino was never associated with Italian Americana and for precisely this reason she is of interest: her films simultaneously illustrate the assimilation that discour­aged any kind of difference (including ethnic difference) and the dangers that assimilation gives rise to.

Like the stepsisters of the Grimm Brothers’ unexpurgated ver­sion of Cinderella, who cut off their toes “to fit in,” accession to mainstream normalcy, whether psychosexual, socioeconomic, po­litical, ethnic, religious, or otherwise, tells the tale of trauma and damage. Heterosexuality, for example, is in but heterodoxy is not. Scorsese and company are right in pointing out the many victims—mostly women—present in Lupino’s films. Different from the fairly broad range of female characters she portrayed, Lupino’s heroines are almost uniformly have-nots. As critic Ron­nie Scheib says, they “walk around in a daze, mutilated, trau­matized, displaced persons wandering aimlessly from halfway house to halfway house on the byways of small city America” (44). Consider Sally’s predicament of unplanned pregnancy in Not Wanted (1949), Lupino’s first outing; Ann’s rape in Outrage (1950); Beware, My Lovely (1952), which stars Lupino as a widow terrorized by her handyman (Robert Ryan); or Carol’s en­counter with polio in Never Fear (1950).

In Never Fear, Carol (played by Sally Forrest), a dancer, suc­cumbs to polio, separates from Guy—her partner on and off the dancefloor—reunites with him as she overcomes her physical handicap, and becomes a sort of Everywoman. Carol’s acceptance of her affliction illustrates the

difficulty of accepting a mutilated, dependent, intersubjec­tive version of womanhood which quite disturbingly corre­sponds to the more traditional, limited definition gener­ally ascribed to that state. (Scheib 54)

Ronnie Scheib’s exceptional formal analysis, from which I will draw extensively, succeeds particularly where it trains on Lupino’s cinematic representation of the female body.

Polio deprives Carol of mastery over her body, a uniquely cruel fate for a dancer. In the pre-illness scenes, Carol and Guy share the screen and Lupino balances them within frames show­ing work and play. The focus dramatically shifts from a bal­anced presentation of the couple as visual element to one-shots of Guy just as Carol’s body is stricken with polio. Lupino underscores the new imbalance and shift from coupledom to singleness by “a few out of focus sound-warped point-of-view shots” of Guy (Scheib 46–47). Following the couple’s break-up, the narrative follows both members as they encounter other potential partners, Len for Carol and Phyllis for Guy.

The camera documents the division-development-reconcilia­tion trajectory. The scenes of her physical therapy, filmed on lo­cation at Los Angeles’s Kabat-Kaiser Rehabilitation Institute, individually show Carol battling her way back to her body. Similarly individuated is Phyllis’s realization that Guy will never love her, which takes place in a “series of extreme close-ups” of her face as she watches him sleep (Scheib 53). Such in­sight into a secondary character’s consciousness illustrates Lupino’s versatility of position (in front of and behind the cam­era, in- and outside specific national affiliations, etc.) described earlier and

emphasizes the “feminine” cast of perception—the pecu­liar, introspective connection with self and far-seeing and yet momentaneous grasp of situation that seems almost the exclusive province of the women, as opposed to the more empirical, action-oriented, positivistic “understanding” of the men. (Scheib 53)

But such directorial dimensioning can translate into the kind of “schizophrenia” that Parker noted. For example, as Scheib ob­serves, the sequence in which Carol triumphs over her cane in re­habilitation splits the image from its coherent, synchronous sound counterpart. Carol’s attempt to walk unaided is

presented with a mixed voice-over track of pep talks by her coaxing doctor and by memory-echoed reprises of her father, and then of Guy, all crying out their need for her. (Scheib 55)

The camera may show Carol and Guy’s reunion but as we see it we recall Carol’s struggle to regain her mobility and experience “the schizophrenia implicit in the sound/image split [that] un­derscores the latent alienation in her recreated ‘autonomy’” (Scheib 55). Never Fear is not simply the story of a young dancer who falls victim to polio; rather, with Lupino’s other films, it allegorizes the conflict between difference and assimilation on any number of levels. Schizophrenia, the lack of perceived co­herence of self, is the dangerous extreme of difference, its menace. And the many domestic Others (women, homosexuals, people of color in the United States, etc.) who must negotiate their differ­ence with assimilationist tendencies and political practice feel the threat.

Performance is crucial to both Never Fear and Hard Fast and Beautiful, a Filmmakers production from 1951. In the former, Carol’s polio stymies her career as a dancer and so alienates her from her sense of self, from her lover, from society. In Hard Fast and Beautiful, Florence’s (Sally Forrest once more) meteoric rise on the amateur tennis circuit threatens to capsize the domestic harmony of her family and menaces the status quo of 1950s gender politics in America. Performance for entertainment successfully mainstreamed Italian Americans; dance—especially the cine­matic representation of dance—had been one point of entry for Italian-American male performers.[14] Around the time of Film­makers’s activity, sports for entertainment had created house­hold names out of such athletes as Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, and Rocky Graziano, with Rocky Marciano and Jake LaMotta recog­nizable as well.

Disappointing some reviewers, the title Hard Fast and Beau­tiful refers “to nothing more alluring than a tennis ball” (cited in Merck 75). Although the tennis court is not the boxing ring or the baseball diamond—the two grittier arenas where most Italian American athletes garnered fame and attention—it had always been considered, in the Victorian England that commodified it, an appropriately genteel place for ladies to compete (see Merck 78). On this cleaner and more genteel stage, Florence’s talented performance will help usher her family from their humble Santa Monica surroundings to the more glamorous lifestyle that Mom Milly (Claire Trevor) desires.

Where is the Lupinian victim in a movie about a tennis cham­pion who chooses hearth and home rather than more material rewards from competition? Bounding with active agency, gain­saying her mother, and acting on her own desires, Forrest’s Flo­rence seems not to qualify. Milly, as critics observe, is the fatal­ity of Hard Fast and Beautiful.[15] Rejected by both Florence and her husband, in the last image of the film, Milly appears sitting alone amid the post-match debris. That she engineers her own fate in ways that complicate her position as victim is indis­putable: like the pushy stage mother she is patterned on, Milly plots, schemes, and exploits everything and everyone in the name of her daughter’s advancement. In fact, Jeanine Basinger fits her under the “destructive mother” type and locates one of her cinematic predecessors in The Hard Way, Lupino’s own vehi­cle from 1942 (Basinger 436). But the demise of the mother does not operate in strict economy with the daughter’s rise to happi­ness. As Merck informs us, “The severity of Milly’s punishment is nowhere compensated for by Florence’s nuptial joy” (83). The price of stardom is an old theme in Hollywood, and the price of ethnic mainstreaming—whatever the channel of performance—was something Italian-American performers would learn to pay.

We should not expect from Ida Lupino full-blown ethnic spec­tacle any more than we should expect her films to be feminist or sensitive to women’s issues in a recognizable way. However, this does not mean that ethnic spectacle or feminism are not vesti­gially present. Carol’s dance numbers and Florence’s tennis games cannot compare, for example, with Carmen Miranda’s ethnic spectacles from the war years. As Shari Roberts shows in her re­cent study, Miranda’s performance is a masquerade that ulti­mately challenges the notion of ethnic essence; this masquerade may be compared to the ways the performance of femininity helps interrogate the notion of a feminine essence.[16] Lupino, as we have seen, did not exalt or even mention her own hybrid, mul­tiple ethnicity. If the traumas of Lupino’s victims remind us of the perils of assimilation, then the experiences of Lupino’s per­forming protagonists serve as a reminder that categories like “ethnic” and “woman” (though we might add feminist, female, and feminine, too) are not nearly so rigid as might appear. As Scorsese said, her films are essential. But they are not “essen­tialist.”

 

Ellen Nerenberg

Wesleyan University

 

Filmography

 

Films in which Lupino appears

 

Her First Affaire (1933)

Search for Beauty (1934)

Peter Ibbetson (1935)

Yours for the Asking (1936)

One Rainy Afternoon (1936)

The Gay Desperado (1936)

Daredevils of Earth (1936)

Anything Goes (1936)

Sea Devils (1937)

Let’s Get Married (1937)

Artists and Models (1937)

The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (1939)

The Light That Failed (1939)

The Lady and the Mob (1939)

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

They Drive by Night (1940)

The Sea Wolf (1941)

Out of the Fog (1941)

Ladies in Retirement (1941)

High Sierra (1941)

Moontide (1942)

Life Begins at Eight-Thirty (1942)

 

 

The Hard Way (1943)

Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)

Forever and a Day (1943)

In Our Time (1944)

Hollywood Canteen (1944)

Pillow to Post (1945)

The Man I Love (1946)

Devotion (1946)

Escape Me Never (1947)

Deep Valley (1948)

Road House (1948)

Woman in Hiding (1949)

On Dangerous Ground (1951)

Beware, My Lovely (1952)

Jennifer (1953)

The Bigamist (1953)

Private Hell 36 (1954)

Women’s Prison (1955)

The Big Knife (1955)

While the City Sleeps (1956)

Junior Bonner (1972)

Devil’s Rain (1975)

Food of the Gods (1975)

My Boys Are Good Boys (1978)

 

Films Written, Directed and/or Produced by Ida Lupino18

 

Young Widow (1946)

The Judge (or: The Gamblers) (1948)

The Vicious Years (or: The Gangster We Made) (1950)

Never Fear (or: The Young Lovers) (1950)

Outrage (1950)

Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951)

 

Not Wanted (1949)

On the Loose (1951)

Beware, My Lovely (1952)

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

The Bigamist (1953)

Private Hell 36 (1954)

Mad at The World (1955)

The Trouble With Angels (1966)

 

18Sources include Appendix in Kuhn, and Heck-Rabi.

 

Television Series19

 

Lupino either directed and/or wrote at least one episode for the series that follow:

 

On trial

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

Dick Powell Theater

Four Star Playhouse

Have Gun—Will Travel

Thriller

Hong Kong

Manhunt

Tate

77 Sunset Strip

The Untouchables

Mr. Novack

Breaking Point

Dr. Kildare

Kraft Suspense Theater

Twilight Zone

Gilligan’s Island

Honey West

Bewitched

The Fugitive

The Rogues

Dundee and the Colhane

The Virginian

The Big Valley

Chrysler Theater

Daniel Boone

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

The Bill Cosby Show

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies

Zane Grey Theater

 

Works Cited

Barolini, Helen, ed. The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.

Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Cervellati, Alessandro. “Italy.” Thesaurus Circensis. Ed. Gian­carlo Pretini. Vol. 1. Udine: Trapezio, 1990. 126.

Casillo, Robert. “Moments in Italian American Cinema: From ‘Little Caesar’ to Coppola and Scorsese.” From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana. Ed. Anthony J. Tamburri, Fred L. Gardaphè, and Paul Giordano. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1991. 374–96.

Conforti, Joseph. “Italian Americans as ‘Ethnics’: Description or Derogation?” Italians in a Multicultural Society. Ed. Jerome Krase and Judith N. DeSena. Forum Italicum Supplement (1994): 35–43.

Cortes, Carlos. “Italian Americans in Film: From Immigrants to Icons.” MELUS 14.3–4 (Fall-Winter 1987): 107–25.

19Sources include Kearney’s and Moran’s Appendix in Kuhn and Heck-Rabi.

De Rosa, Tina. “An Italian American Woman Speaks Out.” At­tenzione (May 1980): 38–39.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: Women’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Dozoretz, Wendy. “The Mother’s Lost Voice in ‘Hard Fast and Beautiful.’” Wide Angle 6.3 (1984): 50–57.

Erens, Patricia. Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film. New York: Horizon P, 1979.

Ferrero, Thomas. “Blood in the Marketplace: The Business of Family in the ‘Godfather’ Narratives.” Sollors 177–207.

Giunta, Edvige. “The Quest for True Love: Ethnicity in Nancy Savoca’s Domestic Film Comedy.” MELUS (Spring 1997): forthcoming.

Golden, Daniel Sembroff. “The Fate of ‘La Famiglia’: Italian Images in American Film.” The Kaleidoscope Lens: How Hol­lywood Views Ethnic Groups. Ed. Randall M. Miller. N.p.: Jerome Ozer P, 1980. 73–97.

Hansen, Miriam. “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valen­tino and Female Spectatorship.” Cinema Journal 25.4 (1986): 6–32.

Heck-Rabi, Louise. Women Filmmakers: A Critical Reception. Metuchen: Scarecrow P, 1984.

Kay, Karyn, and Gerald Peary, eds. Women and the Cinema. New York: Dutton, 1977.

Kearney, Mary Celeste, and James Moran. “Television Pro­grammes and Series Episodes Directed by Ida Lupino.” Kuhn 159–86.

Kuhn, Annette. “Introduction: Intestinal Fortitude.” Queen of the ‘B’s: Ida Lupino Behind the Camera. Ed. Annette Kuhn. Westport: Greenwood P, 1996. 1–12.

Lawton, Ben. “What is ‘ItalianAmerican’ Cinema?” VIA 6.1 (Spring 1995): 27–51.

Lourdeaux, Lee. “Framing Ethnic Culture.” Italian and Irish American Filmmakers in America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. 14–26.

Lupino, Ida. “Me, Mother Directress.” Action 2.3 (June 1967): 15.

Merck, Mandy. “Hard Fast and Beautiful.” Kuhn 73–89.

Quart, Barbara. Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cin­ema. New York: Prager, 1988.

Rabinovitz, Lauren. “The Hitch-Hiker.” Kuhn 90–102.

Reich, Jacqueline. “Nancy Savoca: An Appreciation.” Italian Americana 13.1 (Winter 1995): 11–15.

Roberts, Shari. Seeing Stars: Spectacles of Difference in World War II Hollywood Musicals. Chapel Hill: Duke UP, 1997. Forthcoming.

Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973.

Russo, John Paul. “The Hidden Godfather: Plenitude and Absence in Francis Ford Copola’s Godfather I and II.” Support and Struggle: Italians and Italian Americans in a Comparative Perspective. Ed. Joseph Tropea, James Miller, and Cheryl Beattie-Repetti. Staten Island, NY: AIHA P, 1986. 255–81.

Scheib, Ronnie. “Never Fear.” Kuhn 40–56.

Scorsese, Martin. “Ida Lupino: Behind the Camera, a Feminist.” New York Times Magazine 31 December 1995: 43.

Sollors, Werner, ed. The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Ox­ford UP, 1989.

Tomasulo, Frank. “Italian Americans in the Hollywood Cinema: Fimmakers, Characters, Audiences.” VIA 7.1 (Spring 1996): 65–77.

Valerio, Anthony. Valentino and the Great Italians, According to Anthony Valerio. Toronto: Guernica, 1994.

Weiner, Debra. “Interview with Ida Lupino.” Kay and Peary 169–78.

West, Rebecca. “Scorsese’s ‘Who’s that Knocking at My Door?’: Night Thoughts on Italian Studies in the United States.” Ro­mance Languages Annual 1991. Vol. 3. Ed. Jeanette Beer, Charles Ganelin, and Anthony Julian Tamburri. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Research Foundation, 1992. 331–38.

Whitney, Dwight. “Follow Mother, Here We Go Kiddies.” TV Guide 14.41 (8 Oct. 1966): 14–18.

Woll, Allen, and Randall Miller. “Italians.” Ethnic and Racial Images in American Film and Television. New York: Garland, 1987. 275–307.

 

 

 

 


*Note: The author would like to thank Shari Roberts, Pam Robertson, Jacque­line Reich, and Anthony Valerio for their time and counsel during the writing of this essay.

[1]For the cultural production of ethnicity see Casillo, Sollors, Sembroff Golden, Woll and Miller, Lourdeaux, Lawton, and West. For the history of women involved in Hollywood, see Basinger, Erens, Doane, Rosen, Quart, and the collection edited by Kay and Peary, Women and the Cinema.

[2]See concluding Filmography for a list of Lupino’s film appearances as an ac­tress as well as those films and segments for television she produced and au­thored. Few actresses have made the transition from appearing in front of the camera to directing from behind it, and none have made such prolific contribu­tions.

[3]From 1934 until 1949 Lupino appeared in at least one film per year, for a to­tal of 33. In 1936 alone she appeared in five releases. Even in the 1950s, the decade in which she produced films, Lupino appeared in a film every year ex­cept 1958 and 1959, for a total of ten appearances in eight years. As her ca­reer as a director in TV gained momentum (in the 1960s), her appearances in front of the camera for both screen and TV fell off.

[4]John Paul Russo lists Lupino as an Italian-American director (see Russo 255). Artistic producers do not need to identify with the ethnicity her/his name is thought to represent, for consumers will do that work for them. In the introduction to The Dream Book, Helen Barolini describes her surprise when a female reader revealed she had been drawn to Barolini’s work because of the identity signed by her name on the cover: female and Italian American. Per­haps Lupino’s competing multiple ethnic associations confused spectators (and especially female spectators); Ida Lupino, it appears, was not regarded by young Italian-American women of the 1930s and 40s as an exemplatrix de­spite her abundant screen appearances. For example, in “South Brooklyn, 1947,” Fran Claro tells of her mother’s immersion in harmless blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned heroines, like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, at just the juncture she could have identified with the raven-haired and exquisite Lupino. See Fran Claro, “South Brooklyn, 1947” (Barolini 77–83).

[5]Lupino and Young called their company Emerald Productions, for Lupino’s mother, Connie Emerald; they rechristened the company “Filmmakers” in 1950 (see Kuhn 2).

[6]“Here I am, just an ex-limey broad who can’t get a job,” she is reported telling actor Richard Boone in or around September 1959 (Whitney 15; cited in Heck-Rabi).

[7]See Conforti. As Shari Roberts observes in her study of musicals in the war years, “All the U.S. citizens who were domestic Others were not a part of Hol­lywood’s ideal, mainstream WASP, were not represented by Betty Grable or Alice Faye” (forthcoming, unpaginated).

[8]See Kuhn. Alessandro Cervellati informs us that “Non va dimenticato che Giuseppe Grimaldi generalmente considerato come il creatore del clown mo­derno, era d’origine italiana: suo nonno, il famoso Gamba di Ferro, si era ap­punto fissato in Inghilterra nel 1760” (126).

[9]Walter Ulrich informs us that the clown Joe Grimaldi, in a letter to a friend dated December 1836, signed it “Joe Grim-all-day,” a Cockney pronunciation consonant with the social standing of circus performers in early nineteenth-century England. See “Joseph Grimaldi. Der Englische Clown und Panto­mine,” in Thesaurus Circensis, 1121–28.

[10]See also Lourdeaux on the concept of “double identity,” Sollors on “double consciousness,” and Tomasulo, who discusses both.

[11]For a roadmap to this category’s outposts see Reich, Giunta, Lawton, and Tomasulo. Lawton’s piece is particularly useful in questioning the category’s validity.

[12]Both Tomasulo and Lawton dismiss the absolute need for the presence of Italian-American subjects. For Tomasulo the absence of Italian-specific themes in Frank Capra enables a reading of assimilationist principles and Lawton points to the many “Others” found in Brian DePalma’s films.

[13]Mary Celeste Kearney and James Moran, “Television programmes and se­ries episodes directed by Ida Lupino” (Kuhn 168).

[14]On the valuable example of Valentino see Hansen and Valerio. Regarding the cinematic representation of Italian Americans, it is worthwhile remember­ing that Joe (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) tries to leave behind Rico (Edward G. Robinson) and their common gangster past by becoming a dancer in Little Caesar (LeRoy, 1930) some forty years before Tony Manero (John Travolta) attempts a similar distancing from Brooklyn through dance in Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977) and again in Staying Alive (Stallone, 1983).

[15] See Basinger, Dozoretz, and Merck.

[16]Lauren Rabinovitz cautions against looking for Lupino’s “identification with socially alienated ‘Others,’ such as Beats, drug addicts, juvenile delin­quents or African-Americans,” something much more evident in independent documentary filmmakers from the 50s and 60s like Shirley Clarke. However, Rabinovitz has not made a problem out of Lupino’s ethnic identifications (see Rabinovitz 91–92).