Intro -- ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves -- Copyright -- Contents -- Figures -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction: "No One Would Know It Was Mine": Delmer Daves, Modest Auteur -- 1 Don’t Be Too Quick to Dismiss Them: Authorship and the Westerns of Delmer Daves -- 2 Trying to Ameliorate the Within: Delmer Daves’ Westerns from the 1950s -- 3 Bent, or Lifted Out by Its Roots: Daves’ Broken Arrow and Drum Beat as Narratives of Conditional Sympathy -- 4 This Room is My Castle of Quiet: The Collaborations of Delmer Daves and Glenn Ford -- 5 Delmer Daves, Authenticity, and Auteur Elements: Celebrating the Ordinary in Cowboy -- 6 Home and the Range: Spencer’s Mountain as Revisionist Family Melodrama -- 7 Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma: Aesthetics, Reception, and Cultural Significance -- 8 Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer’s Mountain, and Post-war America -- 9 Partial Rehabilitation: Task Force and the Case of Billy Mitchell -- 10 "This Is Where He Brought Me: 10,000 Acres of Nothin!": The Femme Fatale and other Film Noir Tropes in Delmer Daves’ Jubal -- Index.
As the first comprehensive study of Daves’s career, this collection of essays seeks to deepen our understanding of his work, and also to problematize existing conceptions of him as a competent, conventional and even naive studio man..