ABSTRACT
Thinking about American cinema in light of the questions explored in the rst part of this book is both dazzling and tantalizing. Dazzling, because in American lm sibling love and queer attachment connect in many, varied and simply surprising ways. Tantalizing, because the range of this present book is so small compared to the potential vastness and variety of sibling loves manifest alongside queer loves and as queer loves in American cinema. This vastness and variety would invite a (re)consideration of lm texts from Hollywood musicals like Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul’s 1954 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, melodrama like Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s s 1959 lm version of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, the gothic pleasures of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the strange majesty of John Huston’s The Searchers, the 1950s snappiness and melancholy of Alexander McKendrick’s The Sweet Smell of Success and the millennial cynicism and warmth of Don Roose’s The Opposite of Sex.
