ABSTRACT
Despite the enormous interest in stars, there has been very little study of them, and this has predominantly been sociological, concerned with how stars function in general ideological/cultural terms. Such concerns are certainly central to film studies, but we also need to know how stars function within the films themselves, that is, how the films articulate, carry, inflect, or subvert the general ideological/cultural functions. This article examines the way a single star image, Lana Turner’s, is variously used in films in relation to other elements such as the construction of character, narrative, mise-en-scène and so on. 1
