Download or read book How Did Lubitsch Do It written by Joseph McBride and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orson Welles called Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) “a giant” whose “talent and originality are stupefying.” Jean Renoir said, “He invented the modern Hollywood.” Celebrated for his distinct style and credited with inventing the classic genre of the Hollywood romantic comedy and helping to create the musical, Lubitsch won the admiration of his fellow directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, whose office featured a sign on the wall asking, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Despite the high esteem in which Lubitsch is held, as well as his unique status as a leading filmmaker in both Germany and the United States, today he seldom receives the critical attention accorded other major directors of his era. How Did Lubitsch Do It? restores Lubitsch to his former stature in the world of cinema. Joseph McBride analyzes Lubitsch’s films in rich detail in the first in-depth critical study to consider the full scope of his work and its evolution in both his native and adopted lands. McBride explains the “Lubitsch Touch” and shows how the director challenged American attitudes toward romance and sex. Expressed obliquely, through sly innuendo, Lubitsch’s risqué, sophisticated, continental humor engaged the viewer’s intelligence while circumventing the strictures of censorship in such masterworks as The Marriage Circle, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. McBride’s analysis of these films brings to life Lubitsch’s wit and inventiveness and offers revealing insights into his working methods.
Download or read book Ernst Lubitsch written by Scott Eyman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Highly recommended” (Library Journal): The only full-length biography of legendary film director Ernst Lubitsch, the director of such Hollywood classics as Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, and The Shop Around the Corner. In this groundbreaking biography of Ernst Lubitsch, undeniably one of the most important and influential film directors and artists of all time, critic and biographer Scott Eyman, author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller John Wayne, examines not just the films Lubitsch created, but explores as well the life of the man, a life full of both great successes and overwhelming insecurities. The result is a fascinating look at a man and an era—Hollywood’s Golden Age. Born in Berlin and transported to Hollywood in the 1920s with the help of Mary Pickford, Lubitsch brought with him a level of sophistication and subtlety previously unknown to American movie audiences. He was quickly established as a director of unique quality and distinction. He captivated audiences with his unique “touch,” creating a world of fantasy in which men are tall and handsome (unlike Lubitsch himself) and humorously adept at getting women into bed, and where all the women are beautiful and charming and capable of giving as well as receiving love. He revived the flagging career of Marlene Dietrich and, in Ninotchka, created Greta Garbo’s most successful film. When movie buffs speak of “the Lubitsch touch,” they refer to a sense of style and taste, humor and humanity that defined the films of one of Hollywood’s all-time great directors. In the history of the medium, no one has ever quite equaled his unique talent. Written with the cooperation of an extraordinary ensemble of eyewitnesses, and unprecedented access to the files of Paramount Pictures, this is an enthralling biography as rich and diverse as its subject—sure to please film buffs of all types, especially those who champion Lubitsch as one of the greatest filmmakers ever.
Download or read book The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch written by Leland A. Poague and published by South Brunswick [N.J.] : A. S. Barnes. This book was released on 1978 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood written by Kristin Thompson and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study by an acclaimed American scholar of the artistic interdependencies between the German and the Hollywood cinema in the 1920s.
Download or read book Sex Politics and Comedy written by Richard W. McCormick and published by German Jewish Cultures. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernst Lubitsch (1982-1947) was one of the most successful and influential German filmmakers in American film comedy. In this volume, Rick McCormick argues for a more transnational view of Lubitsch's career and films with respect to nationality, ethnicity, migration, class, sexuality, and gender. McCormick focuses on Lubitsch's Jewishness, which is inseparable from the distinct transnational character of the director, categorizing his early films as "Jewish comedies" where Lubitsch strikes a tenuous balance between Jewish humor, antisemitic jokes, stereotypes, and the incorporation of antifascist subjects into his popular films. Above all, the larger political issues at stake in Lubitsch's work are brought forward: German-Jewish perspectives and experiences, the subtle treatment of covert political and social messages, and the relationship of comedy, especially sexual comedy, to emancipatory politics and, in particular, to the turbulent politics of Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. The book discusses in depth the following films by Lubitsch: The Pride of the Firm (1914), Shoe Palace Pinkus (1916), Meyer From Berlin (1918), I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918), The Oyster Princess (1919), Madame Dubarry (1919), The Doll (1919), Sumurun (1920), The Wildcat (1921), The Marriage Circle (1924), The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), The Love Parade (1929), The Man I Killed (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), and To Be or Not to Be (1942).
Download or read book Billy Wilder written by Joseph McBride and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films—including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment—Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society. In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder’s films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition. Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.
Download or read book Frank Borzage written by Hervé Dumont and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-06-14 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work brings to readers of English a comprehensive and engaging treatment of one of America's greatest, if largely forgotten, film directors. Dumont's celebrated 1993 study, translated from the French by Jonathan Kaplansky, offers complete coverage of Borzage's entire career--the more than 100 films he made and the effect of those films on movie audiences, especially between 1920 and 1940. Lavishly illustrated with 120 photographs, the book also contains a complete filmography, a chronological bibliography, and an index.
Download or read book Saul Bass written by Jan-Christopher Horak and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iconic graphic designer and Academy Award–winning filmmaker Saul Bass (1920–1996) defined an innovative era in cinema. His title sequences for films such as Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) introduced the idea that opening credits could tell a story, setting the mood for the movie to follow. Bass's stylistic influence can be seen in popular Hollywood franchises from the Pink Panther to James Bond, as well as in more contemporary works such as Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002) and television's Mad Men. The first book to examine the life and work of this fascinating figure, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design explores the designer's revolutionary career and his lasting impact on the entertainment and advertising industries. Jan-Christopher Horak traces Bass from his humble beginnings as a self-taught artist to his professional peak, when auteur directors like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, and Martin Scorsese sought him as a collaborator. He also discusses how Bass incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modern art in his work, presenting them in a new way that made them easily recognizable to the public. This long-overdue book sheds light on the creative process of the undisputed master of film title design—a man whose multidimensional talents and unique ability to blend high art and commercial imperatives profoundly influenced generations of filmmakers, designers, and advertisers.
Download or read book Conversations with Wilder written by Cameron Crowe and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned director talks to Cameron Crowe about 30 years at the very heart of Hollywood. Wilder's distinct voice provides a fascinating insider's view of the film industry past and present.
Download or read book Mr Wilder and Me written by Jonathan Coe and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE ROTTERS’ CLUB AND MIDDLE ENGLAND In the heady summer of 1977, a naïve young woman called Calista sets out from Athens to venture into the wider world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing. But the time she spends in this glamorous, unfamiliar new life will change her for good. While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realization that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his new film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich for the shooting of further scenes, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history. In a novel that is at once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of one of cinema’s most intriguing figures, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze on the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it's time to let go? “Outstanding... In a sense, the novel toward which Coe’s fiction has always been heading.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
Download or read book An Empire of Their Own written by Neal Gabler and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry. The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.
Download or read book Design for Living written by Noël Coward and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there.' Design for Living is a wickedly witty dark romantic comedy by Noel Coward. Initially banned in the UK, this provocative play portrays three amoral, glib and stylish characters and their hopelessly inescapable, if also unconventional, emotional entanglement. From 1930s bohemian Paris to the dizzying heights of Manhattan society, a tempestuous love triangle unravels between a vivacious interior designer, Gilda, playwright Leo and artist Otto - three people unashamedly and passionately in love with each other. They are trapped in what Coward called 'a three-sided erotic hodge podge.' With Coward's trademark piquant style, this lively, funny but also atypical play looks at dazzling, egotistical creatures and their self-destructive dependence on each other. Exploring themes of bisexuality, celebrity, success and self-obsession, Design for Living is a stylish and scandalous comedy.
Download or read book When Warners Brought Broadway to Hollywood 1923 1939 written by Martin Shingler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a different take on the early history of Warner Bros., the studio renowned for introducing talking pictures and developing the gangster film and backstage musical comedy. The focus here is on the studio’s sustained commitment to produce films based on stage plays. This led to the creation of a stock company of talented actors, to the introduction of sound cinema, to the recruitment of leading Broadway stars such as John Barrymore and George Arliss and to films as diverse as The Gold Diggers (1923), The Marriage Circle (1924), Beau Brummel (1924), Disraeli (1929), Lilly Turner (1933), The Petrified Forest (1936) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Even the most crippling effects of the Depression in 1933 did not prevent Warners’ production of films based on stage plays, many being transformed into star vehicles for the likes of Ruth Chatterton, Leslie Howard and Bette Davis.
Download or read book Lubitsch Can t Wait written by Ivana Novak and published by Slovenian Cinematheque. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The contributions collected in this book examine Lubitsch's best Hollywood pictures from the 1930s and '40s--Trouble in paradise, Design for living, Ninotchka, To be or not to be, and Cluny Brown--to demonstrate that comedy, at its best, is not merely a matter of providing comic relief."--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book Jews and Shoes written by Edna Nahshon and published by Berg. This book was released on 2008-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews and shoes / Edna Nahshon -- The biblical shoe : eschewing footwear : the call of Moses as biblical archetype / Ora Horn Prouser -- The halitzah shoe : between female subjugation and symbolic emasculation / Catherine Hezser -- The tombstone shoe : shoe-shaped tombstones in Jewish cemeteries in the Ukraine / Rivka Parciack -- The Israeli shoe : "biblical sandals" and native Israeli identity / Orna Ben-Meir -- The shtetl shoe : how to make a shoe / Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett -- The folkloristic shoe : shoes and shoemakers in Yiddish language and folklore / Robert A. Rothstein -- The Holocaust shoe : untying memory : shoes as Holocaust memorial experience / Jeffrey Feldman -- Wanderer's shoe : the cobbler's penalty : the wandering Jew in search for salvation / Shelly Zer-Zion -- The equalizing shoe : shoes as a symbol of equality in the Jewish society in Palestine during the first half of the twentieth century / Ayala Raz -- The fetishist's shoe : "poems of pedal atrocity" : sexuality, ethnicity, and religion in the art of Bruno Schulz / Andrew Ingall -- The artist's shoe : digging into the Jewish roots of shoe-field / Sonya Rapoport -- The theatrical shoe : the utterance of shoemaking : cobblers on the Israeli stage / Dorit Yerushalmi -- The cinematic shoe : Ernst Lubitsch's East European "touch" in Pinkus's Shoe Palace / Jeanette Malkin.
Download or read book Jean Arthur written by John Oller and published by Amadeus Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She is probably best remembered for her wistful-husky voice which, as Pauline Kael wrote, "was one of the best sounds in the romantic comedies of the 30s and 40s". But Jean Arthur's screen career began in silent films and spanned more than a quarter of a century. She worked with great directors of Hollywood's Golden Age: John Ford, Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hawks, George Stevens and Billy Wilder; and she shared star billing with the likes of Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, Charles Boyer and John Wayne. Her most enduring films include Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The More the Merrier, The Whole Town's Talking, A Foreign Affair and, in her last screen appearance, Shane. She was, in fact, one of the most popular and beloved movie stars of her time. Jean Arthur's popularity sprang from her talent, her charm and her quiet beauty, not from her offscreen exploits. Independent, indifferent to most of Hollywood's rules if not defiant of them, treasuring her privacy above all else, she chose to become an enigma - and so she has remained until now. In this, the first biography of Jean Arthur, John Oller, after years of research among the actress's closest friends, relatives and co-workers, has uncovered the life she tried so hard to shroud: a bruising, rootless childhood that left her with a crushing sense of insecurity, but also a steely determination to stand up for herself and what she believed in; a romance with David O. Selznick that ended unhappily, a childless marriage to film executive Frank Ross that descended into bitterness and recrimination, and rumors of lesbianism that continue to this day; legal battles fought over the roles she was offered as well as in defense of animals and the environment; repeated, aborted attempts to conquer Broadway that yielded but one theatrical triumph - as Peter Pan, a character she loved because, like herself, he refused to deal with the world on its terms. This is an engrossing, humane biography that strikes a fitting balance between the acting career and the personal life of an unforgettable star, and does full justice to both.
Download or read book Who I Am written by Charlotte Rampling and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar-nominated Charlotte Rampling most recently appeared in hit ITV drama Broadchurch, the BBC’s London Spy and HBO’s Dexter, and the feature film 45 Years. Her career has spanned popular entertainment and arthouse cinema, having starred in English, French and Italian films from 1966’s Georgy Girl (opposite Lynn Redgrave), to films with French director François Ozon, including 2003’s Swimming Pool. Having shied away from biographies and autobiographies (“too personal”) Rampling has now written Who I Am (first published in French) a lyrical, and intimate self-portrait via reminiscences. Highly personal, packed with photographs from her personal archive, Rampling recounts her childhood and youth as the daughter of an army officer (who won a gold medal for the 4 x 400 relay in the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics), and the memories and passions that would inspire her life and later work as an actress. Written in a style that gives a unique insight into her screen persona, it is an idiosyncratic and beguiling insight of one of the most consistently adventurous and interesting actors.
