Crooked, But Never Common

Crooked, But Never Common PDF

Author: Stuart Klawans

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780231207294

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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 Preston Sturges's work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director's major movies.

Crooked, but Never Common

Crooked, but Never Common PDF

Author: Stuart Klawans

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-01-10

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 023155690X

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In 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.

Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings

Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings PDF

Author: A. Sargeant

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1137466898

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Screen 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?

Film Quotations

Film Quotations PDF

Author: Robert A. Nowlan

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 776

ISBN-13: 147662058X

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Certain 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.

The Runaway Bride

The Runaway Bride PDF

Author: Elizabeth Kendall

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0815411995

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Written with erudition, insight, and enthusiasm, Runaway Bride is a brilliant mix of film and social history that renews our vision and broadens our understanding of some of the best-loved movies ever made, and the complex, Depression-influenced circumstances from which they were born.

The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck

The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck PDF

Author: Catherine Russell

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-05-02

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0252054318

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From The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell’s A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck’s work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress’s off-screen performance within the Hollywood networks that made her an industry favorite and longtime cornerstone of the entertainment community. Russell’s montage approach coalesces into an engrossing portrait of a singular artist whose intelligence and savvy placed her center-stage in the production of her films and in the debates around women, femininity, and motherhood that roiled mid-century America. Original and rich, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck is an essential and entertaining reexamination of an enduring Hollywood star.

Hollywood 1938

Hollywood 1938 PDF

Author: Catherine Jurca

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-03-28

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0520271807

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“While 1938 may have been a turkey of a year for Hollywood cinema, Catherine Jurca’s book is a genuine feast. Hollywood 1938 is both an intense, up-close study of the big budget films and box office tactics behind the film industry’s annus horribilis, and a savvy meditation on the whole swoop and scope of cinema in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Scrupulously researched and engagingly written, Jurca captures the industry infighting, publicity battles, and audience responses to Hollywood’s ‘greatest year’ with easy erudition and penetrating insight.”—Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. “Catherine Jurca has taken a nearly forgotten event in the history of Hollywood and demonstrated how much it can tell us about the state of the motion picture industry and its frailties, as well as its relationship with its audience, at a critical moment in its development. She deftly challenges claims about the centrality of Hollywood to American culture in the 1930s, questions its relationship with the public, and examines the ways in which the industry’s perceptions of that public shaped how it made and marketed movies. This is both excellent scholarship and marvelous storytelling.”—Richard Maltby, author of Hollywood Cinema.