‘We are not calling her Italian’: narratives and images of ethnic incorporation in Isa Miranda’s American persona

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the impact of Hollywood standards of homogenisation on Isa Miranda’s cosmopolitan appeal during her work for Paramount. The article suggests that Miranda’s American image was constructed in an attempt to establish her as a Marlene Dietrich type in order to defuse the potential threat represented by her ethnic Otherness; meanwhile, the Italian actress was framed within film narratives that played out (albeit indirectly) an idealised conception of successful American assimilation of European immigrants. In the process, Miranda was visually constructed through images that effectively ‘whitened’ her, and her Italianness was thus displaced onto an ideal of Northern European whiteness that bespoke a desire to reassert whiteness as the norm in 1930s America.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic film stars
• whiteness
• ethnicity
• Italianness
• homogenisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Press release, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.

2. Anonymous clipping in Miranda’s clipping files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.

3. Paramount presented Miranda as the candidate for the studio’s ‘Queen of It’ – ‘It’ being code for allure, sex appeal, beauty and glamour. As it emerged from a biography of the Italian actress circulating in late December 1938, since the time of Clara Bow, a previous Queen of It, It had been more or less absent from the screen, and only recently had new It girls begun to appear. While Universal presented French Danielle Darrieux, and Warner Brothers matched her with the American Priscilla Lane, MGM came forth with Austrian Hedy LaMarr. However, Paramount insisted that the Studio’s Queen of It had yet to be seen, and that the Paramount candidate was Miranda, ‘the blonde sensation from the Continental stage and screen’ (Anon 1937).

4. This comment can be found in Botsford (1939).

5. This comment can be found in Botsford (1939).

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Antonella Palmieri

Antonella Palmieri is senior lecturer in Film, TV and Media at the University of Lincoln. Her research is concerned with the politics of gender, sexual and ethnic representations in Hollywood cinema and American and British Television. She has contributed to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films (Routledge 2014) and to Stars in World Cinema: Screen Icons and Star Systems across Cultures (I.B. Tauris 2015). Recently, she published ‘Sophia Loren and the healing power of female Italian ethnicity in Grumpier Old Men’, in L. Bolten et al., eds. Lasting Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). Her current project focuses on the construction of Virna Lisi’s star image, anti-feminist narratives and the emergent women’s liberation movement for gender equality in mid-1960s American society.