The Revolt of Mamie Stover
Encyclopedia
William Bradford Huie
William Bradford "Bill" Huie was an American journalist, editor, publisher, television interviewer, screenwriter, lecturer, and novelist.-Biography:...
about a Mississippi prostitute, later a war profiteer in Honolulu. A movie version directed by Raoul Walsh
Raoul Walsh
Raoul Walsh was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the brother of silent screen actor George Walsh...
was filmed in 1956 with Jane Russell
Jane Russell
Jane Russell was an American film actress and was one of Hollywood's leading sex symbols in the 1940s and 1950s....
in the title role.
The fact that Hollywood adapted the book was ironic, given that the first two chapters represent a very sharp indictment of film industry culture. The book's protagonist is described as having been cruelly abused - physically and sexually - by studio directors during her futile efforts to establish an acting career, and as having been driven into prostitution by a bullying film star who cynically exploited and discarded her. The book presents Hollywood as "a jungle where everybody is either predator or prey". This aspect was, however, toned down in the film version.
Over a decade later, Huie wrote a sequel, Hotel Mamie Stover (1963).
The film The Revolt of Mamie Stover served as the basis for a critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
' kinship system and its evaluation of the exchange of women in Elizabeth Cowie's Woman as Sign.