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Book Crooked  But Never Common

Download or read book Crooked But Never Common written by Stuart Klawans and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Crooked  but Never Common

Download or read book Crooked but Never Common written by Stuart Klawans and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Preston Sturges

Download or read book Preston Sturges written by Preston Sturges and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 1990 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Red and Hot

    Book Details:
  • Author : S. Frederick Starr
  • Publisher : Amadeus Press
  • Release : 1985
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 370 pages

Download or read book Red and Hot written by S. Frederick Starr and published by Amadeus Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Screen Hustles  Grifts and Stings

Download or read book Screen Hustles Grifts and Stings written by A. Sargeant and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?

Book Film Quotations

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert A. Nowlan
  • Publisher : McFarland
  • Release : 2016-04-30
  • ISBN : 147662058X
  • Pages : 776 pages

Download or read book Film Quotations written by Robert A. Nowlan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Hollywood 1938

    Book Details:
  • Author : Catherine Jurca
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2012-03-28
  • ISBN : 0520271807
  • Pages : 284 pages

Download or read book Hollywood 1938 written by Catherine Jurca and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.

Book Turner Classic Movies  The Essentials

Download or read book Turner Classic Movies The Essentials written by Jeremy Arnold and published by Running Press Adult. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At head of title: TCM Turner Classic Movies.

Book The Runaway Bride

    Book Details:
  • Author : Elizabeth Kendall
  • Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
  • Release : 2002
  • ISBN : 0815411995
  • Pages : 306 pages

Download or read book The Runaway Bride written by Elizabeth Kendall and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck

Download or read book The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck written by Catherine Russell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Barbara Stanwyck

Download or read book Barbara Stanwyck written by Dan Callahan and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-02-03 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Stanwyck (1907–1990) rose from the ranks of chorus girl to become one of Hollywood's most talented leading women—and America's highest-paid woman in the mid-1940s. Shuttled among foster homes as a child, she took a number of low-wage jobs while she determinedly made the connections that landed her in successful Broadway productions. Stanwyck then acted in a stream of high-quality films from the 1930s through the 1950s. Directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra treasured her particular magic. A four-time Academy Award nominee, winner of three Emmys and a Golden Globe, she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy. Dan Callahan considers both Stanwyck's life and her art, exploring her seminal collaborations with Capra in such great films as Ladies of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, and The Bitter Tea of General Yen; her Pre-Code movies Night Nurse and Baby Face; and her classic roles in Stella Dallas, Remember the Night, The Lady Eve, and Double Indemnity. After making more than eighty films in Hollywood, she revived her career by turning to television, where her role in the 1960s series The Big Valley renewed her immense popularity. Callahan examines Stanwyck's career in relation to the directors she worked with and the genres she worked in, leading up to her late-career triumphs in two films directed by Douglas Sirk, All I Desire and There's Always Tomorrow, and two outrageous westerns, The Furies and Forty Guns. The book positions Stanwyck where she belongs—at the very top of her profession—and offers a close, sympathetic reading of her performances in all their range and complexity.

Book Film Dialogue

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jeff Jaeckle
  • Publisher : Columbia University Press
  • Release : 2013-07-09
  • ISBN : 0231165633
  • Pages : 242 pages

Download or read book Film Dialogue written by Jeff Jaeckle and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film Dialogue is the first anthology in film studies devoted to the topic of language in cinema, bringing together leading and emerging scholars to discuss the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological dimensions of film speech that have largely gone unappreciated and unheard. Consisting of thirteen essays divided into three sections: genre, auteur theory, and cultural representation, Film Dialogue revisits and reconfigures several of the most established topics in film studies in an effort to persuade readers that "spectators" are more accurately described as "audiences," that the gaze has its equal in eavesdropping, and that images are best understood and appreciated through their interactions with words. Including an introduction that outlines a methodology of film dialogue study and adopting an accessible prose style throughout, Film Dialogue is a welcome addition to ongoing debates about the place, value, and purpose of language in cinema.

Book Into the Crooked Place

Download or read book Into the Crooked Place written by Alexandra Christo and published by Feiwel & Friends. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Into the Crooked Place begins a gritty two-book YA fantasy series from Alexandra Christo, the author of To Kill a Kingdom. The streets of Creije are for the deadly and the dreamers, and four crooks in particular know just how much magic they need up their sleeve to survive. Tavia, a busker ready to pack up her dark-magic wares and turn her back on Creije for good. She’ll do anything to put her crimes behind her. Wesley, the closest thing Creije has to a gangster. After growing up on streets hungry enough to swallow the weak whole, he won’t stop until he has brought the entire realm to kneel before him. Karam, a warrior who spends her days watching over the city’s worst criminals and her nights in the fighting rings, making a deadly name for herself. And Saxony, a resistance fighter hiding from the very people who destroyed her family, and willing to do whatever it takes to get her revenge. Everything in their lives is going to plan, until Tavia makes a crucial mistake: she delivers a vial of dark magic—a weapon she didn’t know she had—to someone she cares about, sparking the greatest conflict in decades. Now these four magical outsiders must come together to save their home and the world, before it’s too late. But with enemies at all sides, they can trust nobody. Least of all each other.

Book Topsy

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Daly
  • Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
  • Release : 2013-07-02
  • ISBN : 0802194575
  • Pages : 403 pages

Download or read book Topsy written by Michael Daly and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a nineteenth-century elephant caught between warring circuses and battling scientists, from the author of The Book of Mychal. In 1903, on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted. Many historical forces conspired to bring her, Thomas Edison, and those 6,600 volts of alternating current together that day. Tracing them all in Topsy, journalist Michael Daly weaves together a fascinating popular history, the first book to tell this astonishing tale. At the turn of the century, circuses in America were at their apex with P. T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh competing in a War of the Elephants. Their quest for younger, bigger, or more “sacred” pachyderms brought Topsy to America. Fraudulently billed as the first native-born elephant, Topsy was immediately caught between the disputing circuses as well as the War of the Currents, in which Edison and George Westinghouse (and Nikola Tesla) battled over the superiority of alternating versus direct current. Rich in period Americana, and full of circus tidbits and larger than life characters, Topsy is a touching and entertaining read. “A rollicking pachydermal tale . . . A summer escape.” —The New York Times “A nineteenth-century reality show that boggles the mind as the pages fly by with events that have you laughing out loud one moment and gasping in disbelief the next.” —Tom Brokaw “I’ve always respected Michael Daly as a great New York writer . . . He humanizes and speaks for those animals who cannot speak. He touches the hearts of those of us who are not animal activists.” —James McBride “A skillfully told and admirably researched reminder of a time not as long ago as we’d like to think.” —The Wall Street Journal

Book Crooked

    Book Details:
  • Author : Cathryn Jakobson Ramin
  • Publisher : HarperCollins
  • Release : 2017-05-09
  • ISBN : 0062641808
  • Pages : 412 pages

Download or read book Crooked written by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Carved in Sand—a veteran investigative journalist who endured persistent back pain for decades—delivers the definitive book on the subject: an essential examination of all facets of the back pain industry, exploring what works, what doesn't, what may cause harm, and how to get on the road to recovery. In her effort to manage her chronic back pain, investigative reporter Cathryn Jakobson Ramin spent years and a small fortune on a panoply of treatments. But her discomfort only intensified, leaving her feeling frustrated and perplexed. As she searched for better solutions, she exposed a much bigger problem. Costing roughly $100 billion a year, spine medicine—often ineffective and sometimes harmful —exemplified the worst aspects of the U.S. health care system. The result of six years of intensive investigation, Crooked offers a startling look at the poorly identified risks of spine medicine, and provides practical advice and solutions. Ramin interviewed scores of spine surgeons, pain management doctors, physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians, exercise physiologists, physical therapists, chiropractors, specialized bodywork practitioners. She met with many patients whose pain and desperation led them to make life-altering decisions, and with others who triumphed over their limitations. The result is a brilliant and comprehensive book that is not only important but essential to millions of back pain sufferers, and all types of health care professionals. Ramin shatters assumptions about surgery, chiropractic methods, physical therapy, spinal injections and painkillers, and addresses evidence-based rehabilitation options—showing, in detail, how to avoid therapeutic dead ends, while saving money, time, and considerable anguish. With Crooked, she reveals what it takes to outwit the back pain industry and get on the road to recovery.

Book Preston Sturges

Download or read book Preston Sturges written by Nick Smedley and published by Intellect (UK). This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges, whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. This book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges' whole oeuvre, incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources.