Cover -- Title -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Film Studies -- 1. The Early Thirties: Modernity, New Women, and the Aesthetic of Attractions -- 2. Normative Desires and Visual Sobriety: Apogee of the Classical Model -- 3. The Male Subject of Noir and the Modern Gaze -- 4. (Dis)Adventures of Female Desire in the 1940s Woman's Film -- 5. Excess, Spectacle, Sensation: Family Melodrama in the 1950s -- 6. Performative Bodies and Non-referential Images: Excesses of the Musical -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.