Includes index.

Introduction: Naked at the window -- The iceman cometh -- A powder puff? -- Is this allowed? -- Hideaway -- Codes and codebreakers -- The goddamn monster -- Gable and Cukor -- Tracy and Hepburn -- Buddies and cowboys -- "The cat's in the bag, the bag's in the river" -- Dead attractive: Cary Grant -- Indecency, gross or mass market? -- The male gaze -- Perverse -- Burning man -- Gigolo -- Doing it, saying it -- An open door.

The celebrated film critic ... gives us a wholly original, seductive account of sexuality in the movies and of how actors and actresses onscreen have fed--and formed--our desire. Film can make us want things we cannot have. But, while sometimes rapturous, the potent interaction of onscreen beauty and private desire also speaks to a crisis in American culture, one that pits delusions of male supremacy against feminist awakening and the spirit of gay resistance. Combining criticism, memoir, and his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, David Thomson probes the tangled notions of masculinity, femininity, beauty, and sex; the said and the unsaid; the seen and the unseen--and all their various asymmetric relations--that characterize our cinematic imagination. We see how the movies have begun to reveal the fault lines in conventional masculinity and to point the way past it, toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person desiring others. Ranging from advertising to pornography, Rock Hudson to Kristen Stewart, Bonnie and Clyde to Call Me by Your Name, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant to Phantom Thread, Thomson illuminates the way in which film as art, entertainment, and business has historically been a polite cover for a kind of erotic séance. Thomson, in his inimitable way, makes us see how the way we watch movies is a kind of training for how we live."--From publisher.