Maggie Gunsberg examines popular genre cinema in Italy from the late 1940s to the early 1970s focussing on melodrama, commedia all'italiana, peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. These genres are explored in five thematic sections, discussing: * Desire and the family in melodrama * Gender and consumption in commedia all'italiana * The cult of masculinity in the peplum * Representations of femininity in the horror film * Masculinity as style in the spaghetti western Throughout the book, Gunsberg adopts an interdisciplinary approach informed by current film theory and other perspectives (psychoanalytic, materialist, deconstructive), which leads to the analysis of genre-specific representations of femininity and masculinity as constructed by the formal properties of film. This sophisticated contribution will be of direct interest to all those interested in Italian cinema, popular culture and gender.