Nearly forty years on from its original publication, Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By... still packs quite the Proustian punch, with its chorus of then venerable, now long-dead legends of the silent era reminiscing on experiences that even then were 40 years in the past.
Drawing on three decades of research, Searching covers Ford's directing, history as a co-founder of the Directors Guild, politics, and his wildly contradictory personality, valiantly attempting to separate Ford’s many masks from his actual visage.
In his exhaustive biography of the shadowy, half-forgotten yet indomitable African-American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux, McGilligan deftly assembled the sterling research of scholars of early black filmmaking into a compelling account of a quixotic life.
Hawks, a cofounder of the Directors Guild, was unusual in scrappy, knockabout early Hollywood; as an educated rich kid from Pasadena, he was slumming in what was still seen as a disreputable industry.
Exiles in Hollywood looks at Fritz Lang, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and Otto Preminger, analyzing the profound effect they had on American popular cinema after leaving UFA Studios.
For a personal insight into the buccaneering, freebooting youth of Hollywood, you can’t do better than the memoirs of the man behind the eye patch.
A rollicking account of mid-century Hollywood, City of Nets opens with the movie industry at the pinnacle of its success (1939) and ends 10 years later with the chaos of the HUAC hearings, the rise of television, and the Supreme Court’s antitrust decision.
Originally published in 1985, Chaplin: His Life and Art offers a full immersion in the previously impenetrable method of Chaplin as a director.
As this Taschen volume makes clear, the Master of Suspense remains appealing to cineastes young and old, with 50-plus features underscoring his timeless ingenuity.
Author Gwenda Young makes the case that from the silent era to the golden age, Clarence Brown deserves a place among the giants.
Director Ernst Lubitsch, who was idolized by Wilder and Welles, is brought into sharp focus.
The making of George Stevens' Texas-sized epic is recounted in Don Graham's meticulously chronicled book.
As the newly scaled down yet no less comprehensive Taschen book Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made demonstrates, Kubrick was nothing if not a completist.