Warning Shadows
Home Alone with Classic Cinema
Published on 19. April 2010
368 pages
978-0-393-33900-0 (ISBN)
Description
A brilliantly insightful and witty examination of beloved and little-known films, directors, and stars by one of America's most esteemed critics.
In his illuminating new work, Gary Giddins explores the evolution of film, from the first moving pictures and peepshows to the digital era of DVDs and online video-streaming. New technologies have changed our experience of cinema forever; we have peeled away from the crowded theater to be home alone with classic cinema. Recounting the technological developments that films have undergone, Warning Shadows travels through time and across genres to explore the impact of the industry's most famous classics and forgotten gems. Essays such as "Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!,” "Edward G. Robinson, See,” and "Prestige and Pretension (Pride and Prejudice)” capture the wit and magic of classic cinema. Each chapter—ranging from the horror films of Hitchcock to the fantastical frames of Disney—provides readers with engaging analyses of influential films and the directors and actors who made them possible.More details
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06/2010
WW Norton & Co
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Person
Gary Giddins is the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He was the Village Voice jazz columnist for over 30 years and remains a preeminent jazz critic who received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998. His other books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903?1940, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research; Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Faces in the Crowd; Natural Selection; Warning Shadows; and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He has won an unparalleled six ASCAP?Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting.
Content
- Intro
- BOOKS BY GARY GIDDINS
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HOME ALONE WITH CLASSIC CINEMA
- You Pays Your Money
- Peeping
- Screening
- Televising
- Digitizing
- Laughter and Tears
- PART TWO DIRECTORS AND STARS
- 1 Touched By Ernst Lubitsch
- 2 The John Ford Code
- Ford at War
- Ford at Fox
- 3 Three by Howard Hawks
- 4 Frank Capra, True Believer
- 5 Guilty: Alfred Hitchcock
- 6 That Wild So-and-So William A. Wellman
- 7 The Orson Welles Dilemma
- After Kane
- The Trouble with Mr. Arkadin
- Dark Knight
- 8 John Brahm: The Evil That Men Do
- 9 Michael Curtiz's Doris Day Period
- 10 Anthony Mann of the West
- 11 Sam Fuller's Pulp Cinema
- 12 Akira Kurosawa's Deep Focus
- Olympian
- Red Harvests
- 13 Medieval Ingmar Bergman: God Is in the House, Maybe
- 14 Sergio Leone: Heroes, Villains, and Idiots
- 15 Sidney Lumet's Family Plots
- 16 The Magical Unreality of Lech Majewski
- 17 Edward Yang's Family Ties
- 18 Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!
- 19 Joan Crawford Is Dangerous
- 20 Bette Davis, Bigger Than Life
- 21 The Serenity of Alice Faye
- 22 Edward G. Robinson, See
- 23 Humphrey Bogart: Falcons and Fascists
- 24 Let's Be Frank
- 25 James Stewart: No More Mr. Nice Guy
- 26 Boris Karloff: He's Alive!
- PART THREE MOVIES BY GENRE
- BIOPICS
- 27 A Legend in His Own Mind (El Cid)
- 28 Lust for Lives (Young Mr. Lincoln / Lust for Life)
- 29 Felonious Munch (Edvard Munch)
- 30 Hitler's Magic Flute (Hamsun / Hunger)
- FANTASY / HORROR
- 31 Early German Psychos (German Expressionism Collection)
- 32 It Wasn't Beauty Killed the Beast (King Kong / Grass / Chang)
- 33 Masters and Grandmasters (The Thief of Bagdad / Icons of Adventure)
- 34 Urban Legend (Blade Runner)
- 35 Carnivores (Dark Sky Films)
- COMEDY
- 36 Running for a Train (The General)
- 37 Road Warrior (Trafic)
- LITERARY ADAPTATIONS
- 38 Prestige and Pretense (Pride and Prejudice)
- 39 An Unhappy Film in Its Own Way (Anna Karenina)
- 40 Classics and Semi-Classics Illustrated (Literary Classics Collection)
- 41 A Rosetta Stone for the 1950s (Ben-Hur / The Man Who Fell to Earth / Bad Timing)
- 42 John Huston's Novel Approach (Under the Volcano)
- 43 Lights! Camera! Talk! (Tennessee Williams)
- 44 Maxiseries (A Dance to the Music of Time / Fabio Montale)
- MUSICALS
- 45 Who's Afraid of Al Jolson? (The Jazz Singer)
- 46 Pennies from Heaven (The Threepenny Opera)
- 47 Habit Forming (The Busby Berkeley Collection)
- 48 Smilin' Them to Death (Hallelujah / The Green Pastures / Cabin in the Sky)
- 49 Vaudeville (Bing Crosby: Screen Legend Collection)
- 50 Techni-glory (The Tales of Hoffman / Rodgers & Hammerstein / Gregory Hines)
- 51 Casting Doubts (Fiddler on the Roof / Presenting Lily Mars)
- 52 How Jazzed Can You Get? (Passing Through / A Great Day in Harlem / Blues in the Night / Pete Kelly's Blues)
- The Scene
- Lost and Found
- Group Portrait
- Mining the Misery
- THE DISNEY (AND ANTI-DISNEY) VERSION
- 53 Battling Nazis with Sambas (Saludos Amigos / The Three Caballeros)
- 54 Dog Days (Lady and the Tramp / Hayao Miyazaki / Max and Dave Fleischer)
- 55 Uncle Walt's Prairie Home Companion (True-Life Adventures)
- CRIME / NOIR
- 56 Men Without Molls (Gangsters Collection, Vol. 3)
- 57 Elementary (Charlie Chan / Michael Shayne)
- 58 To Coin a Genre (Kino's Film Noir)
- 59 New Grubb Streets (Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4)
- 60 The Deadly Forties (I Wake Up Screaming / When Strangers Marry)
- 61 Who Is Harry Lime? (The Third Man)
- 62 Joker (Ace in the Hole)
- 63 Salvage Jobs (Affair in Trinidad / The Garment Jungle)
- 64 Mob Mentality (Mafioso / Excellent Cadavers)
- WAR / AGITPROP
- 65 Wars to End Wars (All Quiet on the Western Front / 49th Parallel)
- 66 Love the Warriors (Overlord / The Guns of Navarone / The Caine Mutiny)
- 67 Theater of the Absurd (Merrill's Marauders)
- 68 In Search of Lost Time (Muriel / La belle captive)
- 69 A Soviet Guide to Cuba (I Am Cuba)
- 70 The Redmen Are Coming (Indianerfilmes)
- 71 Recalling the Future of Nuclear War (The War Game / Culloden)
