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Author: Stuart Klawans
Publisher:
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780231207294
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic's insight and a fan's enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Preston Sturges's work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director's major movies.
Author: Stuart Klawans
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2023-01-10
Total Pages: 174
ISBN-13: 023155690X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948—The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek among them—all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclaim, Sturges’s achievements remain underappreciated: he is too often categorized as a dialogue writer and plot engineer more than a director, or belittled as an irresponsible spinner of laughs. In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads—discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight—and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges’s movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers—and funnier than ever.
Author: Stuart Klawans
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOutlining a history of film going too far, of seeming madness and wasteful extravagance, this text examines films that are cinematic landmarks and monuments to directors' hubris, from Griffiths' Intolerance to Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Carax's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. The text explores the changing conditons of the industry under which figures such as L'Herbier and Lang, von Sternberg and Ophuls got their hands on the full apparatus of studio production, while behaving as individual artists. It questions the shape of film history from the viewpoint of these pictures and relates the notion that a failed work of art may be more glorious than a success.
Author: S. Frederick Starr
Publisher: Amadeus Press
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Preston Sturges
Publisher:
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: A. Sargeant
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2016-06-15
Total Pages: 105
ISBN-13: 1137466898
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScreen Hustles, Grifts and Stings identifies recurrent themes and techniques of the con film, suggests precedents in literature and discusses the perennial appeal of the con man for readers and viewers alike. Core studies span from film (Catch Me If You Can, Paper Moon, House of Games) to television (Hustle), from Noir (The Grifters) to Romantic Comedy (Gambit). Frequently, the execution of the con is only finely distinguishable from the conduct of a legitimate profession and, challengingly, a mark is often shown to be culpable in his or her undoing. The best con films, it is suggested, invite re-watching and reward the viewer accordingly: who is complicit and when? How and where is the con achieved? When is the viewer party to the con? And what, if any, moral is to be drawn?
Author: Robert A. Nowlan
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-04-30
Total Pages: 776
ISBN-13: 147662058X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCertain lines define a movie. Marlene Dietrich in Morocco: “Anyone who has faith in me is a sucker.” Too, there are lines that fit actor and character. Mae West in I’m No Angel: “I’m very quick in a slow way.” Jane Fonda in California Suite: “Fit? You think I look fit? What an awful shit you are. I look gorgeous.” From the classics to the grade–B slasher movies, over 11,000 quotes are arranged by over 900 subjects, like accidents, double entendres, eyes (and other body parts!), ice cream, luggage, parasites, and ugliness. Each quote gives the movie title, production company, year of release, speaker of the line, and, when appropriate, a comment putting the quote in context.
Author: Grégoire Halbout
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2022-01-13
Total Pages: 401
ISBN-13: 1501347624
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Love at first sight, whirlwind marriages, break-ups, divorces, remarriage... What accounts for the enduring success of the Hollywood madcap comedies of the 1930s? Directed by masters of comedy (Hawks, LaCava, Leisen, Ruggles...) and featuring the decade's most iconic stars (Colbert, Dunne, Grant, Hepburn...), these films set romantic comedy standards for decades to come. Screwball comedy embarked on two challenging missions: to poke fun at established social norms and to undermine stereotypical depictions of gender roles, putting forward a discourse that postulated the possibility of equality between men and women. Grégoire Halbout's reexamination of screwball comedy provides a comprehensive overview of this (sub)genre, eschewing the auteurist approach and including “minor” works never before analyzed through the screwball lens. His book explains how these screwball stories met the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for the liberalization of morals, with daring plots, verbal humor and slapstick techniques. Building on the work of Cavell, Altman and Gehring, as well as international and French scholarship, Halbout's investigation unfolds in three parts. He first establishes a definition of Hollywood screwball comedy through a cross-sectional analysis of its socio-historical context and an in-depth examination of the genre. He then situates screwball comedy in relation to its institutional context. An exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic meant to subvert the prohibitions of the 1934 Hollywood Production Code through a verbal and visual rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre's placement of romantic intimacy at the center of the public sphere and the democratic debate, confirming that screwball eccentricity upholds America's founding values: freedom of speech, free consent, and contractual engagement.
Author: Jeremy Arnold
Publisher: Running Press Adult
Published: 2016-05-03
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 0762459468
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt head of title: TCM Turner Classic Movies.
Author: James Harvey
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 1998-03-22
Total Pages: 738
ISBN-13: 9780306808326
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1934 four movies—It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, The Thin Man, and The Gay Divorcee—ushered in the golden age of the Hollywood romantic ("screwball") comedy. Slangy, playful, and "powerfully, glamorously in love with love," the films that followed were unique in their combination of swank and slapstick. Here are the directors—Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise), Capra (It Happened One Night), Hawks (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday), McCarey (The Awful Truth), La Cava (My Man Godfrey, Stage Door), Sturges (The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle at Morgan's Creek)—and their stars—Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, William Powell, Myrna Loy, among others—all described and analyzed in one comprehensive and delightful volume.
