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We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II
During the highly charged years of World War II, movies perhaps best communicated to Americans who they were and why they were fighting. These films were more than just an explanation of historical events: they asked audiences to consider the Nazi threat, they put a face on both the enemies and allies, and they explored changing wartime gender roles. This book shows how film after film repeated the narratives, character types, and rhetoric that made the war and each American's role in it comprehensible. To write this book the authors watched more than six-hundred films made between 1937 and 1946—including ...Read More
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In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin
Because screenwriter Robert Riskin spent most of his career collaborating with legendary Hollywood director Frank Capra, Riskin’s own unique contributions to film have been largely overshadowed. With five Academy Award nominations to his credit for the monumental films Lady for a Day, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It with You, Here Comes the Groom, and It Happened One Night (for which he won the Oscar), Riskin is often imitated but rarely equaled.
In Capra’s Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin is the first detailed critical examination of the Hollywood pioneer’s life and work. In ...Read More
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Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane
This book departs from the traditional understanding of the relationship between film and history. By looking at production records, scripts, and contemporary reviews, the book argues that certain classical Hollywood filmmakers were actively engaged in a self-conscious and often critical filmic writing of national history. This volume is a reassessment of American historiography and cinematic historians from the advent of sound to the beginning of wartime film production in 1942. Focusing on key films such as Cimarron (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), Ramona (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), Jezebel (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Gone with the ...Read More
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Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars
Hal Wallis might not be as well known as David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, but the films he produced—Casablanca, Jezebel, Now Voyager, The Life of Emile Zola, Becket, True Grit, and many other classics (as well as scores of Elvis movies)—have certainly endured. As producer of numerous films, Wallis made an indelible mark on the course of America’s film industry, but his contributions are often overlooked and no full-length study has yet assessed his incredible career.
A former office boy and salesman, Wallis first engaged with the business of film as the manager of a Los Angeles movie theater ...Read More
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Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age
From Ken Burns’s documentaries to historical dramas such as Roots, from A&E’s Biography series to CNN, television has become the primary source for historical information for tens of millions of Americans today. Why has television become such a respected authority? What falsehoods enter our collective memory as truths? How is one to know what is real and what is imagined—or ignored—by producers, directors, or writers?
Gary Edgerton and Peter Rollins have collected a group of essays that answer these and many other questions. The contributors examine the full spectrum of historical genres, but also institutions such as the History Channel ...Read More
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Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film
Offering both in-depth analyses of specific films and overviews of the industry's output, Hollywood's Indian provides insightful characterizations of the depiction of the Native Americans in film. This updated edition includes a new chapter on Smoke Signals, the groundbreaking independent film written by Sherman Alexie and directed by Chris Eyre. Taken as a whole the essays explore the many ways in which these portrayals have made an impact on our collective cultural life.
Raises interesting issues and challenges readers to consider the complex realities of American Indian cultures and Indian/non-Indian relations that major motion pictures often fail to communicate. -- ...Read More
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Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood
From Double Indemnity to The Godfather, the stories behind some of the greatest films ever made pale beside the story of the studio that made them. In the golden age of Hollywood, Paramount was one of the Big Five studios. Gulf + Western’s 1966 takeover of the studio signaled the end of one era and heralded the arrival of a new way of doing business in Hollywood. Bernard Dick reconstructs the battle that culminated in the reduction of the studio to a mere corporate commodity. He then traces Paramount’s devolution from free-standing studio to subsidiary—first of Gulf + Western, then ...Read More
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It's Only a Movie! Films and Critics in American Culture
Once derided as senseless entertainment, movies have gradually assumed a place among the arts. Raymond Haberski's provocative and insightful book traces the trajectory of this evolution throughout the twentieth century, from nickelodeon amusements to the age of the financial blockbuster.
Haberski begins by looking at the barriers to film’s acceptance as an art form, including the Chicago Motion Picture Commission hearings of 1918–1920, one of the most revealing confrontations over the use of censorship in the motion picture industry. He then examines how movies overcame the stigma attached to popular entertainment through such watershed events as the creation of the ...Read More
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American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing
A unique perspective on half a century of American cinema—from the audience’s point of view. Tom Stempel goes beyond the comments of professional reviewers, concentrating on the opinions of ordinary people. He traces shifting trends in genre and taste, examining and questioning the power films have in American society. Stempel blends audience response with his own observations and analyzes box office results that identify the movies people actually went to see, not just those praised by the critics. Avoiding statistical summary, he presents the results of a survey on movies and moviegoing in the respondents’ own words—words that surprise, amuse, ...Read More
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Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir
More than any other writer, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) is responsible for raising detective stories from the level of pulp fiction to literature. Chandler’s hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe set the standard for rough, brooding heroes who managed to maintain a strong sense of moral conviction despite a cruel and indifferent world . Chandler’s seven novels, including The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953), with their pessimism and grim realism, had a direct influence on the emergence of film noir. Chandler worked to give his crime novels the flavor of his adopted city, Los Angeles, which was still something ...Read More
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