Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic As Contemporary Film Genre (review)

Ten years ago, when I first read George F. Custen's book Bio/pics as a graduate student, I knew there was more to Hollywood's representation of great lives than a simple construction of conservative "public history." Dennis Bingham has proved it, rethinking the genre that Custen first drew scholarly attention to in 1992. While Custen focused on the complex production histories behind Twentieth Century-Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck's studio biographies of great, mostly American men, revealing Hollywood and the American public's appetite for popular history and success stories, Bingham is less concerned with the interwar era that defined the nation's historical film genre. Instead, he deliberately breaks the studio bubble with an exploration of arguably the most brash, innovative, and controversial biopic ever made, Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz's Citizen Kane (1941). Over the years, film theorists and historians have argued over Citizen Kane's historical antecedents and significance, and Bingham joins a few stalwarts who see the film not only as the epitome of American cinematic art but as "a genre changing event in the history of the biopic."

Bingham pursues his revisionist popular biographies of men with equally engaging analyses of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992), and Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994). And of course, for some, no book on masculine biopics would be complete without a chapter on -you guessed it—Oliver Stone and Nixon (1994). Running through these chapters is the familiar paradox of popular and revisionist social history in the twentieth century—the hunger for warts-and-all portraits of the historically vetted great [American] men, and the feeling expressed by both Clarence Darrow and Andy Warhol that any nobody could be President or get famous.

Bingham shifts ideological gears with part two of this book, which looks at women's biopics in Hollywood and beyond. This is where I began to feel that at last something really contentious was about to be said. Bingham had prepared the reader by arguing early on that "Biopics of women are structured so differently from male biopics as to constitute their own genre" and that due to the culture's problem with seeing "public" women, biopics were guilty of "trapping them for decades in a cycle of failure, victimization, and the downward trajectory." Bingham does a neat job of deconstructing Lillian Roth's biopic I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955) and the filmed biography of Barbara Graham, a woman convicted and executed for murder in California, in I Want to Live! (1958). Both roles were played by one of the queens of melodrama, Susan Hayward. These biographical downers return in the 1980s with Frances (1982) and Gorillas in the Mist (1988), and it seems from Bingham's analysis that women can never win, even when the director is a woman (he finishes off the genre with Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, 2006).

After reading this section, I was annoyed. One of the problems with Bingham's book is that despite his interesting visual analysis of a variety of films and his engaging style, he did not (unlike Custen) go into a film production archive to see exactly why certain decisions were made about scripts, casting, and marketing of women's and indeed men's biopics. This portrait of film biography therefore emerges more from one film historian's personal interpretation than from the historical material anchoring films' contexts in their production eras. How does one justify or give priority to a visual interpretation? Those same film archives and many prominent films absent from Bingham's bibliography paint a different picture of women's historical/ biographical presence on screen. In the studio era (1920-1965), historical fictions, including biographies of semi-invented figures, were all but dominated by women. In these films, women faced often crushing odds, but triumphed against adversity. Remember Scarlett O'Hara (Gone with the Wind, 1939)? She is Charles Foster...