Academic film criticism's reluctance to look at Reynolds appears in a standard MLA Bibliography subject search: "Burt Reynolds" gets one hit. Kramer, and Reynolds doesn't make another appearance in the book. 1Ĭavell moves straight into an analysis of Kramer vs. I think the reason for that opinion is a reluctance on the part of people of a certain cultivation to see how charming and perceptive a leading man Burt Reynolds can be, when not cast as a good old boy. I believe An Unmarried Woman is generally thought to be a better film than Starting Over, the comparison invited by the presence in both of Jill Clayburgh as the female lead. Stanley Cavell, in trying to understand changes in comedies of remarriage from their apogee in the 1930s to the 1970s, claims that, Reynolds brought America the New South. Once the region came, during the Reagan era, to seem merely representative of the American nation as a whole, Reynolds' cultural relevance was over. Both his extraordinary success in the 1970s and his critical neglect since are symptomatic of this momentous transformation. Reynolds' movies brought to artistic realization a crucial social and political transformation in the postwar U.S. Yet critical respect and Reynolds are near strangers to each other. Despite the fact that, by many measures, Reynolds was the most important movie star of the 1970s, indeed one of the most significant stars in Hollywood history, his work and his career have rarely received careful attention. Reynolds the movie star temporally and culturally bridges the period from Nixon to Reagan so perfectly by representing the changing orientation of American identity, not just in terms of ideology -the reddening of America -but also in terms of physical space -the key region, its weather, architecture, and urbanization. But movie stardom, like a successful presidential campaign, expands from its regional stronghold across the entire map. Burt Reynolds's films, on the surface, address a particularly Southern, regional, audience.
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