Basinger, Jeanine 1936- (Jeanine Deyling Basinger)

PERSONAL:

Born February 3, 1936, in Ravenden, AR; daughter of John and Sarah Deyling; married John Basinger (an actor and teacher), May 10, 1967; children: Savannah Lee. Education: South Dakota State University, B.S. (with honors), 1957, M.S. (with high honors), 1958. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Protestant.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Middletown, CT. Office—Box AA, Wesleyan University P.O., Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06457.

CAREER:

Writer, educator, editor. South Dakota State University, Brookings, instructor in introductory English, 1958-59; American Education Publications, Xerox Education Division, Middletown, CT, copywriter for Weekly Reader Children's Book Club, 1960-62, marketing director, 1960-69, advertising director, 1962-68, editorial consultant, 1969-79, assistant editor of Young People's Encyclopedia, 1973; Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, teaching associate, 1971-72, adjunct lecturer, 1972-76, adjunct associate professor, 1976-80, associate professor, 1980-84, professor of film, 1984—, currently Film Studies chair and founder and curator of the Cinema Archives. William Hornbeck Visiting Lecturer at Connecticut College, 1971 and 1972; Eugene O'Neill Theatre Centre, National Theatre of the Deaf, visiting lecturer, summers, 1971, 1972, 1978, and 1979; Hartford College for women, visiting lecturer, 1972; Yale University, visiting lecturer, 1972 and 1973; visiting professor at American Film Institute, Kent Extension, summer, 1974. Guest on television and radio programs, including Women's World, 20/20, and All Things Considered. Trustee, National Center for Film and Video Preservation, beginning 1979, and University Film Study Center, 1980-81. Member of grants panels, National Endowment for the Arts, 1983, 1984, and 1985; member of Film Award selection board, Brandeis University, Creative Arts Award Commission. Member of advisory boards and committees for various groups and associations, including Johnson Reprint Corporation, Film Books, 1980-82, Connecticut Screening Room programming, Connecticut Public Television, 1981, 1982, and Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, beginning 1982; advisor to Yale Law School Film Series, University of Connecticut film series, Wadsworth Atheneum Film Program, Channel 3 Hartford Cinema Club, Kit Parker Films restoration project, Corinth Films, and Universal 16mm Catalogue; consultant to motion pictures, Broadway shows, television specials, television news, and magazines and newspapers. Board of directors of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, 2005—. Producer, American Masters, television show, 2000; A Better Way to Die, 2000, actress.

MEMBER:

National Film Society, American Film Institute (member of board of trustees, beginning 1979; trustee emeritus), Association of Independent Film and Video Makers (member of board of advisors), Phi Kappa Phi.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Anthony Mann: A Critical Analysis was nominated as Best Film Book of the Year, National Film Society; William K. Everson Film History Award, 1999, for Silent Stars.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with John Frazer and Joseph W. Reed) Working with Kazan, Wesleyan University Press (Hanover, NH), 1973.

(Assistant editor) Young People's Encyclopedia, American Education Publications (Middletown, CT), 1973.

Shirley Temple, Pyramid (New York, NY), 1975.

Gene Kelly, Pyramid (New York, NY), 1976.

Lana Turner, Pyramid (New York, NY), 1977.

Anthony Mann: A Critical Analysis, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1979, revised edition, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2007.

World War II Combat Films: Anatomy of a Genre, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1985, revised edition with updated filmography by Jeremy Arnold, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2003.

(Editor) The "It's a Wonderful Life" Book, Knopf (New York, NY), 1986.

American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Filmmaking, Rizzoli (New York, NY), 1994.

A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960, Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

Silent Stars, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

The Star Machine, Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Women and Film: A Resource Handbook, Association of American Colleges, 1973; Kit Reed, editor, Fat: An Anthology, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1974; Ted Sennett, editor, The Movie Buff's Book, Pyramid, 1977; The Movie Buff's Book #2, Pyramid, 1977; Gerald Peary and Karyn Kay, editors, Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, Dutton, 1977; Dannis Peary, editor, Closeups: The Movie Star Book, Whitman Publishing, 1978; Great Film Makers, St. James Press/Macmillan, 1984; Great Films, St. James Press/Macmillan, 1984; and Actors and Actresses, St. James Press/Macmillan, 1984.

Also author of program notes. Contributor to Collier's Encyclopedia, 1984, 1985, and Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, 1986. Contributor to University of Connecticut Film Series Publications, 1974 and 1975, Films, Inc. Catalogue, winter, 1977, Audio Brandon Teaching Guides, 1978, and Kit Parker Films Catalogue, 1979; contributor to Post-Newsweek Stations, 1975-76, and Royal Film Archive of Belgium, 1978. Contributor of reviews and articles to periodicals, including American Film, Bright Lights, Film Fan Monthly, Bijou, Movietone News, and New York Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

When Jeanine Basinger became a film studies professor at Wesleyan University, she began to examine the so-called dichotomy of the classic "wom- en's film" of Hollywood's Golden Age. Her studies have resulted in several published works, including A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960. In this book Basinger invites a new look at American social attitudes toward women as expressed in such classics as Imitation of Life, Mildred Pierce, and Kitty Foyle, as well as less-remembered efforts like Day-time Wife and The Guilt of Janet Ames.

Basinger's findings touch on the idea of life choices given to women characters, and how cultural pressures to make the "right choice" (the man over the career) does not, as some feminists have asserted, lessen the impact of female empowerment. "Maybe the heroine does give up her career in the last five minutes of the film," Florence King wrote in an American Spectator review, "but for the first eighty-five the audience saw her running the world."

Taking issue with "feminist film critics who pin the blanket of ‘self-sacrifice’ on anti-career movies," King continued, "Basinger offers a testy reminder." She quoted Basinger in the book: "As I have repeated often enough, a women's film, in order to tell its story, has to present a central character of great importance who is out in the world doing something. Since movies encouraged audiences to identify with characters or dream about having the same experiences … women were inevitably going to project themselves into situations in which they got out and did something. To sacrifice herself … she must have enough to make the sacrifice interesting—i.e., something to lose. This showed female audiences a woman of importance."

While King saw "absolutely no need for another book about women ‘n’ movies," she conceded that A Woman's View "is [especially] fun to read" and "unusually well-written to boot. True, it contains a few dippy sentiments and theories, but that's the whole point, you see. No woman who grew up in the heyday of American movies is quite right in the head." Basinger "makes a persuasive (if not always riveting) case for the women's picture as a rich, complicated and subversive genre worthy of serious and well-informed considerations," said Film Quarterly writer Carole Zucker, who added that the author "makes a convincing case that while women's pictures cross over into nearly every other recognizable genre—melodrama, comedy, swashbuckler, musical, Western, et al.—they retain their primary characteristic: they are about women and women's problems."

In 1999 Basinger produced Silent Stars, an appreciation of silent-era luminaries from Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow to Gloria Swanson and John Gilbert. She asserts that the carefully crafted public personas of the earliest film celebrities masked the true artistry they imbued on silent films. While Entertainment Weekly reviewer Charles Winecoff faulted the book for containing "noninsights" into the personalities behind the press agents, a New York Times Book Review evaluation by Gene Santoro took a different view. Santoro concluded that Basinger's "hard-won knowledge, charming persistence and critical acuity let her see things anew and, in the process, [reinflate] most of her icons into more interesting characters than many of their heirs, the celebs who float airily through our postmodern world." According to Stephen Rees in Library Journal, Silent Stars "is a fond yet perceptive look at some overlooked, misunderstood, or underappreciated stars" written "with wit, enthusiasm, and a refreshing lack of condescension."

Basinger continues her examination of Hollywood in her 2007 title, The Star Machine, In this work she focuses on the studio system from the 1930s to the 1950s and the manner in which studio bosses discovered talent and then groomed that person into star quality, separating him or her from a legion of other character actors. Public taste was of utmost importance in the packaging of these stars, Basinger shows. Thus, for example, June Allyson assumed the wholesome girl-next-door image while Errol Flynn was sold as a swashbuckler type. Basinger supports her contentions with numerous profiles of stars, including Carmen Miranda, Lana Turner, Tyrone Power, Deanna Durbin, Loretta Young, and Norma Shearer. The old studios micro-managed every aspect of a star's career, from acting lessons to telling them how to walk and talk; from hair-dos to the trimming of eyebrows. Basinger also tackles the question of how today's stars differ from those of Hollywood's golden years, further contending that the old star machine became defunct after World War II.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Manohla Dargis thought Basinger "can be a sharp, funny writer, and she's particularly on point when it comes to the ridiculous clothes that sometimes swaddled stars of the golden age." However, Dargis also faulted the author for her disdain for a more intellectual approach to film criticism: "You don't need to write like an academic to be a good scholar, you also don't need to resort to anti-intellectualism to affirm your populist cred." A some- what similar assessment was offered by Booklist reviewer Ray Olson, who felt The Star Machine "makes for lightly engaging, absorbing reading, perfect for waiting rooms, plane trips, and firesides." A Kirkus Reviews critic had a higher opinion of the same work, however, terming it "a smart study of star quality as an industrial process, written by an academic who still understands Hollywood's cheap, sensuous appeal." And William Grimes, writing for the New York Times Book Review, also found much to like in the book, observing that Basinger "ingeniously picks apart the gears and levers of the [star] machine, analyzing the careers of a handful of stars whose ups and downs illustrate the studio system at its smooth-functioning best, or reveal its hidden inefficiencies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960, Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

Basinger, Jeanine, Silent Stars, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, January, 1994, Florence King, review of A Woman's View, p. 60.

Booklist, November, 1999, Mike Tribby, review of Silent Stars, p. 497; October 1, 2007, Ray Olson, review of The Star Machine, p. 9.

Economist, October 16, 1999, "Early Film: Speechless with Mirth," p. 13.

Entertainment Weekly, January 14, 2000, Charles Winecoff, review of Silent Stars, p. 70; October 26, 2007, Chris Nashawaty, "Star Factory," p. 72.

Film Quarterly, summer, 1994, Carole Zucker, review of A Woman's View, p. 58.

Hollywood Reporter, November 22, 2007, review of The Star Machine, p. 16.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2007, review of The Star Machine.

Library Journal, February 15, 1995, Michael Rogers, review of American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Filmmaking, p. 156; December, 1999, Stephen Rees, review of Silent Stars, p. 136; June 1, 2003, Michael Rogers, review of World War II Combat Films: Anatomy of a Genre, p. 176; October 1, 2007, Stephen Rees, review of The Star Machine, p. 72.

New York Times Book Review, December 25, 1994, Lee Siegel, review of American Cinema, p. 14; November 14, 1999, Gene Santoro, "Louder than Words: A Movie Scholar Finds That the Idols of the Speechless Screen Had Something Going for Them," p. 13; October 31, 2007, William Grimes, review of The Star Machine; December 30, 2007, Manohla Dargis, "Hot Properties," p. 17.

Publishers Weekly, July 12, 1993, review of A Woman's View, p. 64; September 26, 1994, review of American Cinema, p. 46; November 1, 1999, review of Silent Stars, p. 62.

Reference & Research Book News, February 1, 2008, review of The Star Machine.

School Library Journal, May, 1995, review of American Cinema, p. 138.

ONLINE

Internet Movie Database,http://www.imdb.com/ (July 2, 2008), "Jeanine Basinger."

National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Web site,http://www.nbrmp.org/ (July 2, 2008), "Wesleyan Chair Jeanine Basinger to Join National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Board of Directors."

Wesleyan University Web site,http://www.wesleyan.edu/ (July 2, 2008), "Jeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies."