Sleeping with Strangers

Introduction: Naked at the window -- The iceman cometh -- A powder-puff? -- Is this allowed? -- Hideaway -- Codes and codebreakers -- The Goddamn monster -- Gable and Cukor -- Tracy and Hepburn -- Buddies and cowboys -- "The cat's in the bag, the bag's in the river" -- Dead attractive: Cary Grant -- Indecency, gross, or mass market? -- The male gaze -- Perverse -- Burning man -- Gigolo -- Doing it, saying it -- An open door -- Acknowledgments -- Index. From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, an original, seductive account of sexuality in the movies and of how actors and actresses on screen have fed our desire. Film can make us want things we can not have. But, while sometimes rapturous, the interaction of onscreen beauty and private desire speaks to a crisis in American culture, one that pits delusions of male supremacy against feminist awakening and the spirit of gay resistance. Combining criticism, his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, and memoir, David Thomson examines how film has found the fault lines in traditional masculinity and helped to point the way past it toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a perso