Mass-Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture ed. by David W. Marshall, and: American Smart Cinema by Claire Perkins, and: Hollywood and the American Historical Film ed. by J. E. Smyth (review)

At first glance it seems that the three books under review differ widely from one another in terms of content. Marshall's Mass-Market Medieval looks at the ways in which medieval history has been reinvented in western popular cultures on film and television as well as in music and tourist sites. Perkins' American Smart Cinema takes a close look at recent American film genres beyond the mainstream that adopt a self-conscious approach to authorship and narrative. J. C. Smyth's American Historical Film comprises a series of interventions on the relationship between film and history past and present, including work from Roberts Sklar and Robert Rosenstone, David Culbert and Nicholas J. Cull. Interestingly enough, however, all three texts offer fascinating insights into how filmmakers from different backgrounds with different interests - writers, directors, and producers - use the past to make sense of the present and future. Looking at the way they have dealt with this issue over time tells us a lot about the cultures that shaped their point of view, as well as how they reacted to those cultures.

Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959), treated by David Eldridge in the Smyth collection, offers a good example. Although set in 1929, the film tells us a lot more about late 1950s attitudes towards gender and censorship, as revealed through the director's desire to create "a 'heterosexual' motivation for transvestism" (108). Wilder had had his arguments with the PCA (Production Code Administration) in the past; in The Seven Year Itch (1956), for instance, he had been forced to remove all suggestions that Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) had committed adultery with The Girl (Marilyn Monroe). Three years later he was in no mood for compromise; hence, to "sneak around" the censors, he set his film in the Roaring Twenties and had Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis cross-dress to subvert "the moral Puritanism of the Production Code [...] and implicitly suggest that it, too, was as discredited as Prohibition" (112).

In this model 'history' is conceived as a self-conscious interpretation of the past, revealing a lot about the interpreters and their preoccupations at a specific point in time. This approach can prove very suggestive: Benjamin Earl's piece on tourist sites devoted to King Arthur in Mass-Market Medieval argues that tourism managers have concentrated on the idea of 'tradition' in an attempt to attract more visitors. Gift-shops peddle examples of "traditional Welsh craftsmanship," while restaurant menus are dominated by "traditional Welsh recipes" (110-11). This tradition has been deliberately fabricated as part of a strategy to maximize the sites' commercial potential, as well as to promote the cause of Welsh nationalism after the creation of the National Assembly in Cardiff in 1998. Likewise, Katherine J. Lewis suggests that the historical material in the British sitcom The Black Adder (1983) - the first of four highly successful series - is equally fabricated. Its inspiration comes from mainstream comedies such as Up Pompeii (1969-70), a BBC spoof of the Roman era starring comedian Frankie Howerd, which was itself inspired by the music hall and variety shows of the early and mid-twentieth century.

Mass-Market Medieval is nothing if not eclectic in its choice of subject matter. Essays on the Vikings in hard rock and heavy metal show how musicians appropriate specific images of the medieval to emphasize the superiority of the Nordic races. Another piece on the BBC's 2003 reworking of The Canterbury Tales shows how Chaucer...