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Melissa Croteau, Cowboy Hamlets and zombie Romeos: Shakespeare in genre film, Adaptation, Volume 15, Issue 1, March 2022, Pages 145–147, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apab013
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Kinga Földváry’s recent monograph, Cowboy Hamlets and zombie Romeos: Shakespeare in genre film, lives up to its lively name and is a welcome addition to the ever-growing wealth of academic work on Shakespeare-related media. Földváry’s carefully and clearly structured book covers Shakespeare-inspired, Anglophone feature films which predominantly fit into prominent Hollywood genres. Part I of the volume deals with ‘Classical Hollywood cinema’ and contains chapters on the western; woman’s film and melodrama; and film noir, gangster, and gangster noir. She makes cogent arguments for these particular groupings in the introduction dedicated to Part I of the book. Part II looks at ‘Contemporary blockbusters’, which she defines as genres that (re)gained popularity in the 1990s, and is comprised of chapters on the teen film, monster films dealing with vampires and zombies, and the contemporary biopic. Each of the six content chapters looks at four to six films in some detail, so the book tackles roughly thirty films, an ambitious undertaking, requiring an enormous amount of research, which is displayed consistently and effectively throughout. Some of the films analysed, such as Joe Macbeth (dir. Ken Hughes 1955) and 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger 1999), have garnered a great deal of critical attention already. Others, such as the western McLintock! (dir. Andrew V. McLaglen 1963) and queer teen film Lost and Delirious (dir. Léa Pool 2001), have languished in relative obscurity. It is Földváry’s adept treatment of these lesser known films, as well as more recent films, such as the biopic All is True (dir. Kenneth Branagh 2018), that make this book an important contribution to screen Shakespeare scholarship.
