Abstract
Cornel Wilde is an important, but often overlooked, filmmaker who contributed substantially to shifts in how violence was depicted on-screen in American cinema. Wilde, who began his career as an actor and achieved leading man status in the 1940s before moving behind the camera as an independent writer and director, helmed a string of films in the 1960s that, in various ways, redefined and/or expanded how violence could be depicted. This chapter offers a critical examination of the four films he directed during this period—Sword of Lancelot (1962), The Naked Prey (1966), Beach Red (1967), and No Blade of Grass (1970)—and how they challenged the esthetic limits of on-screen violence while also articulating a consistent philosophy about the troubling role of violence throughout human history.
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Kendrick, J. (2022). “Man’s Greatest Catastrophe”: Violence in the Films of Cornel Wilde. In: Choe, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05390-0_7
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