C.A.Lejeune Film Reader

C.A.Lejeune was among the first professional film critics in the world., her columns in 'The Observer' commanding a huge readership. her career spanned the rise, the great days of the industry and the dawn of the television age. She saw the coming of sound and colour, the advent of the star systems and the wide screen. Her column was read for its percipience, humour, kindliness and good writing by people who never went to the cinema at all. This comprehensive section of her articles, essays and review, from silent film to the 1960s, has an autobiographical element. She tells how she became a critic and what criticism means; she recalls her long acquaintance with Alfred Hitchcock and Alexander Korda, Leslie Howard and Robert Donat, personalities - unforgettable and unforgotten - who gave British cinema its finest hours. For students of film history, this is essential reading. For lovers of old films, it is an instructive and nostalgic delight. And like, C.A. Lejeune's column, it will appeal to any reader who likes good writing and civilised values. As Anthony Asquith remarked, 'she has a style as vivid as her perception is acute...that peculiarly English thing, a delicious sense of nonsense and, above all.
..the ability to infect one with her own enthusiasm'.