Over the last three decades before the 1979 revolution in Iran, 1,186 narrative features were made, from which 1,115 titles were screened in the country’s movie theaters. Many of these films contributed to the development and maintenance of a hybrid form of cinematic production and aesthetic style collectively known as Filmfarsi. Continuously censured by the critics inside Iran, there has been a surge of interest in the Anglophone research on Filmfarsi in the 2010s. Following the lead of Hamid Naficy’s A Social History of Iranian Cinema (2011), many of the recent configurations of Filmfarsi have considered it a reflection of Iranian society at the time, and thus, reproduced misconceptions about its generative and receptive mechanisms. This research paper challenges the claims about Filmfarsi’s generic substructure, star system, and perceived opposition to the so-called “new wave” of Iranian cinema. Instead, it argues for a reconsideration of Filmfarsi as an inevitable mode of production with an audiovisual style shaped by the clash of its producers’ aspirations for an international standard with the economic and technological constraints of a fledgling industry. Specifically, I argue that male stardom carried a weighty share of the compensation for the shortcomings of Filmfarsi in its competition with the cinematic imports. Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond genre approaches and representation surveys of the pre-revolutionary Iranian popular cinema toward a socio-cinematic analysis of its star images. Using R. W. Connell’s theoretical framework on masculinities and benefitting from archival research into a variety of Persian pop magazines and trade presses since the early 1960s, I specifically investigate four modes of Iranian hegemonic masculinities embodied by Mohammad Ali Fardin, Reza Beyk Imanverdi, Naser Malak Motii, and Behrouz Vossoughi. As exemplars of the culturally exalted forms of manhood, these stars were responsible for the production of 316 features or more than 25% of the overall products of the pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema. These actors’ popularity along with their occasional performance in critically acclaimed films necessitate re-examining their on-screen persona and off-screen presence in the public sphere. This investigation offers insight into the construction of stars, superstars, and cult stars as well as their contribution to the consolidation or transformation of cultural norms and social traditions. Instead of taking popular cinema as the mirror reflection of society and culture, then, this study suggests that we can revisit Filmfarsi as the cinematic encapsulation of a nation’s gendered desires, yearnings, and shortcomings.