Henryk Hoffmann, Three Hollywood Stalwarts in Literature: A Study in Film Perception Through References to Peck, Mitchum and Holden (Vernon Press, 2022)
Henryk Hoffmann, Three Hollywood Stalwarts in Literature: A Study in Film Perception Through References to Peck, Mitchum and Holden, Vernon Press, 2022, 353 pages. ISBN 978-1-64889-288-2.
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1Henryk Hoffmann’s newest book is an excellent exploration of the lives, artistic achievements, social influence and, more specifically, modern perception in literature of three Hollywood legends: Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and William Holden. Hoffmann’s major objectives/research questions include: (1) analyzing the perception of these actors and their films as referred or alluded to in (mostly) U.S. American literature, considering 240 works by 140 authors; (2) establishing the social and cultural impact of the actors and their films referenced in those works; (3) delineating the actors’ screen personalities, images, personae and overall legacies based on the presented material; and (4) compiling data for further film and literature-related studies.
- 1 Helman, Alicja. Słownik pojęć filmowych (A Dictionary of Film Terminology) (Katowice: Wiedza o Kult (...)
- 2 Suber, Howard. The Power of Film (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2006).
2The aims, scope and method of the study are extensively outlined by Hoffmann in the introduction. He justifies the choice of the three actors for his research by drawing analogies and pointing out overlapping paths in the actors’ careers, as well as indicating the relative abundance of references to their names and films discovered in literature (novels, short stories, plays, poems and some nonfiction books) during his extensive research. Furthermore, he unambiguously defines the terminology used in his study—including terms such as screen personality, image, persona and projection-identification—and offers an extensive description and origin of the last concept, which may be especially unfamiliar even to cinephiles. In order to do so, he refers the reader to Alicja Helman’s Słownik pojęć filmowych (1991)1 and summarizes her findings along with both her and others’ pertinent theories (including Sigmund Freud’s, Jean Deprun’s, Jean Mitry’s, Jean-Louis Baudry’s and Teresa de Laurentis’s). He also explains the concept of individual or subjective perception by quoting excerpts from Howard Suber’s book The Power of Film (2006).2
3The main body of the book consists of three parts, each focused on one of the actors and each further divided into the following five sections: references to the actor’s films, references to the actor’s name, overall list of references found (alphabetized according to the authors’ names), credits of the actor’s films referenced (their numbers, in each of the respective parts, being twenty-three, twenty-five and twenty-one) and the actor’s monographic bibliography. While all of the sections play an important role in the general goal of the book, the first two are the most crucial as they present the references and allusions, explain their contexts and offer detailed analyses, which in turn allow Hoffmann to draw conclusions about various manifestations of film perception and impact. The first section, furthermore, provides extensive evidence of the qualities of particular movies and recognition of different people involved in their production, particularly actors. The second section presents numerous examples of a given actor’s praise and popularity and, thus, makes it possible to establish his stardom and fandom, as well as to define his screen personality/image/persona. In the final paragraphs of the first section, the author recapitulates the conclusions from the quoted excerpts and compares his findings with the obvious highlights in each actor’s career. He concludes the second section with a comprehensive analysis of the overall findings, compares them with the commonly known facts about the actor’s career, and thus draws a fairly complete picture of his legacy.
4In the Epilogue, subtitled Final Remarks and Conclusions, Hoffmann readdresses the factors determining the choice of Peck, Mitchum and Holden as the topic of his book by sharing his own statistics regarding the numbers of references to different actors’ names and films. Then, in order to demonstrate the diversity and the timescale of his resources and thus substantiate their collective validity, he analyzes the profiles of the quoted writers in terms of the genre they focus on, gender, age and number of cited works (the authors’ nationality/ethnicity—U.S. American, Canadian, Argentinian, English, French and Australian—was already addressed in the Introduction). Apart from this, Hoffmann summarizes and juxtaposes the conclusions from the analytical sections of each of the three parts. As a result, he is able to establish, among other things, that the films with the largest number of references (ranging from twenty-three to ten)—Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957) and Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954)—also happen to be the ones with the biggest impact and/or popularity and the most prestigious honors received since their respective releases.
- 3 O’Kane, Leslie. Finding Gregory Peck: Life’s Second Chances (Scott Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independ (...)
- 4 Siegal, Nina. A Little Trouble with the Facts (New York: Harper/HarperCollins, 2008).
- 5 Koontz, Dean. Your Heart Belongs to Me (New York: Bantam Dell, 2008).
- 6 Wilson, F. Paul. Infernal (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2005).
- 7 Japrisot, Sebastien. The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun. Translated from the French by Hele (...)
- 8 De los Santos, Marisa. Love Walked In (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2006).
- 9 Harrison, Jim. True North (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
5In his analyses, Hoffmann demonstrates how the material extracted from the references illustrates the gradual modification of the actors’ screen personalities, as well as their individual images and personae. He accomplishes it by juxtaposing excerpts pertaining to films from different periods, especially when multiple references to one actor’s movies are found in the same work, e.g., Leslie O’Kane’s Finding Gregory Peck (2015),3 Nina Siegal’s A Little Trouble with the Facts (2008)4 and Dean Koontz’s Your Heart Belongs to Me (2008),5 three novels brimming with references and allusions to Peck, Mitchum and Holden, respectively, as well as their films. He also indicates the rich variety of reasons and contexts behind all the references discussed. They range from common or typical ones—such as an analogy between a situation in a book and that in a movie or between a literary character and an actor made by the narrator or one of the characters, a movie show as a social or romantic event (with specific titles occasionally used to enhance the authenticity of the time setting) and a description of a specific location (e.g., an interior, a building or a piece of land)—to relatively rare or even bizarre references such as, for instance, an exchange about political propaganda, a movie poster, Audrey Hepburn’s hairstyle, Mitchum’s tattooed knuckles or an enormous fish. Moreover, Hoffmann gives examples of the most ingenious references in all three parts. Some of them, like the ones discovered in F. Paul Wilson’s Infernal (2005, in the context of To Kill a Mockingbird)6 or in Sebastien Japrisot’s The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1966, presented in the entry on Sunset Boulevard) 7illustrate the identification-projection phenomenon. Others, like the ones encountered in Marisa de los Santos’s Love Walked In (2006, in the entry on Roman Holiday)8 and in Jim Harrison’s True North9 (in the context of Picnic), are impressive because they ingeniously exemplify the concept of film perception subjectivity.
6One of the major goals of the project is to confirm the legendary status of the three actors by demonstrating their enormous impact as well as the artistic assets of their films. While examples of the latter are countless and obvious as many references presented in the volume depict different characters praising particular pictures, the impact of the actors themselves is established primarily by showing how deeply their images or performances influence certain literary characters to a degree that allows defining those instances as perfect cases of the identification-projection mechanism.
- 10 Simsion, Graeme. The Rosie Effect (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Simsion, Graeme. The Rosie Pr (...)
- 11 O’Kane, Leslie. Finding Gregory Peck: Life’s Second Chances (Scott Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independ (...)
- 12 Munn, Michael. Gregory Peck (London: Robert Hale, 1998), 116.
- 13 Server, Lee. Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 481–482.
7In the case of Gregory Peck, the evidence of his collective impact is overwhelming, especially as presented in the excerpts from the novels by Graeme Simsion10 and Leslie O’Kane,11 while the assets of his foremost performances and his quintessential screen image, are confirmed by the multiple and perceptive references to several of his films, especially The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958) and To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). His screen image is, according to Hoffmann, “a unique combination of impressive intellect, high moral standards and serious involvement in human welfare” (p. 106). Mitchum’s complex persona, defined by Hoffmann as “the tough, rebellious, adamant, daring, uncompromising, sometimes insolent, belligerent and misbehaving guy” (p. 201), is perceived as such by characters in many books, especially in the context of references to Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) and The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). According to Hoffmann, Holden’s screen personality of “an essentially good, charming, caring but somewhat naïve young man, unchanged during the first decade of his career, was significantly enriched with some subtly negative traits (such as moral weakness and conformity)” (p. 306), which is best illustrated by the multiple quotations referring to Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969). The legendary status of Peckinpah’s film, by the way, is proven by the popularity of its line, “Let’s go!”, which is numerously quoted in Hoffmann’s book. The author also justifies his use of the epithet ‘stalwart’ in the title of this book by showing its use in reference to two of the actors in biographical books by other authors, in Gregory Peck by Michael Munn12 and in Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” by Lee Server.13
8Clearly, both the scope of the project and the amount of the collected and examined data is impressive. Hoffmann offers a convincing contextual interpretation and explanation of the reasons for the uses of the movie references in modern literature. At the same time, he proposes a specific method of investigating the interrelations between film and literature based on the study of film-and-actor references in the works of modern writers. Three Hollywood Stalwarts in Literature is addressed to a wide range of readers, such as average filmgoers, movie buffs, film students, film historians and literary scholars. Additionally, the book offers a vast database for studies on a variety of film-related topics, fandom and projection-identification, in particular. In sum, Henryk Hoffmann’s book attests to his work as an unremitting data searcher. A good read with indisputable educational values, the book should also encourage readers to reach for some of the films and literary works discussed in it. Finally, the enormous database presented in the book, when looked at from a completely different angle, can illustrate a generally ignored or unrealized aspect of the film-literature relationships, that of a particular author’s special skill in applying movie references for a number of narrative reasons, such as building up characters, making analogies between complex situations, recreating an authentic time setting or location and several others.
Endnote
1 Helman, Alicja. Słownik pojęć filmowych (A Dictionary of Film Terminology) (Katowice: Wiedza o Kulturze, 1991).
2 Suber, Howard. The Power of Film (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2006).
3 O’Kane, Leslie. Finding Gregory Peck: Life’s Second Chances (Scott Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015).
4 Siegal, Nina. A Little Trouble with the Facts (New York: Harper/HarperCollins, 2008).
5 Koontz, Dean. Your Heart Belongs to Me (New York: Bantam Dell, 2008).
6 Wilson, F. Paul. Infernal (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2005).
7 Japrisot, Sebastien. The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun. Translated from the French by Helen Weaver (New York: Penguin, [1966] 1980).
8 De los Santos, Marisa. Love Walked In (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2006).
9 Harrison, Jim. True North (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
10 Simsion, Graeme. The Rosie Effect (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Simsion, Graeme. The Rosie Project (New York: Simon & Schuster, [2013] 2014).
11 O’Kane, Leslie. Finding Gregory Peck: Life’s Second Chances (Scott Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015).
12 Munn, Michael. Gregory Peck (London: Robert Hale, 1998), 116.
13 Server, Lee. Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 481–482.
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Electronic reference
Roman Kopytko, “Henryk Hoffmann, Three Hollywood Stalwarts in Literature: A Study in Film Perception Through References to Peck, Mitchum and Holden (Vernon Press, 2022)”, Film journal [Online], 11 | 2025, Online since 01 June 2025, connection on 19 April 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/2082; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15gwj
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