Screwball Comedy and Film Noir

Screwball Comedy and Film Noir PDF Author: Thomas C. Renzi
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786488603
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive comparative analysis of the screwball comedy and film noir genres--two popular Hollywood staples that emerged around the same time. Despite their contrast in tone and theme, "Screwball" and "Noir" have many narrative elements in common. The author defines the two genres, discusses their historical development and inter-related conventions, and offers detailed comparative analyses of a number of films, among them The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday (screwballs), and Gilda and Sunset Blvd. (noirs).

Screwball Comedy and Film Noir

Screwball Comedy and Film Noir PDF Author: Thomas C. Renzi
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786488603
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive comparative analysis of the screwball comedy and film noir genres--two popular Hollywood staples that emerged around the same time. Despite their contrast in tone and theme, "Screwball" and "Noir" have many narrative elements in common. The author defines the two genres, discusses their historical development and inter-related conventions, and offers detailed comparative analyses of a number of films, among them The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday (screwballs), and Gilda and Sunset Blvd. (noirs).

The Art of the Screwball Comedy

The Art of the Screwball Comedy PDF Author: Doris Milberg
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786467819
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Part One of this entertaining exploration of screwball comedies and their later offspring begins in the mid-1930s discussing the careers of popular stars such as Cary Grant and Carole Lombard and well-known supporting players like Walter Connally and Ralph Bellamy (also Asta the dog, top animal star of the 1930s!). Writers and directors are given their due: Frank Capra, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, just to name a few. Part Two, the meat of the book, takes an in depth look at the films, from the genre's inception (1934's It Happened One Night) to the recent 2003 Down with Love, and the stars that appear in them--Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Julia Roberts, Richard Gere--ending with some thoughts about the future.

Romantic Vs. Screwball Comedy

Romantic Vs. Screwball Comedy PDF Author: Wes D. Gehring
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810844249
Category : Comedy films
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
It is an informative resource for film students and scholars and a thoroughly engaging read for film buffs."--BOOK JACKET.

Hollywood Bedlam

Hollywood Bedlam PDF Author: William K. Everson
Publisher: Citadel Press
ISBN: 9780806515342
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Fay Wray and Robert Riskin

Fay Wray and Robert Riskin PDF Author: Victoria Riskin
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1524747297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Biography) A Hollywood love story, a Hollywood memoir, a dual biography of two of Hollywood’s most famous figures, whose golden lives were lived at the center of Hollywood’s golden age, written by their daughter, an acclaimed writer and producer. Fay Wray was most famous as the woman—the blonde in a diaphanous gown—who captured the heart of the mighty King Kong, the twenty-five-foot, sixty-ton gorilla, as he placed her, nestled in his eight-foot hand, on the ledge of the 102-story Empire State Building, putting Wray at the height of New York’s skyline and cinematic immortality. Wray starred in more than 120 pictures opposite Hollywood's biggest stars—Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper (The Legion of the Condemned, The First Kiss, The Texan, One Sunday Afternoon), Clark Gable, William Powell, and Charles Boyer; from cowboy stars Hoot Gibson and Art Accord to Ronald Colman (The Unholy Garden), Claude Rains, Ralph Richardson, and Melvyn Douglas. She was directed by the masters of the age, from Fred Niblo, Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March), and Mauritz Stiller (The Street of Sin) to Leo McCarey, William Wyler, Gregory La Cava, “Wild Bill” William Wellman, Merian C. Cooper (The Four Feathers, King Kong), Josef von Sternberg (Thunderbolt), Dorothy Arzner (Behind the Make-Up), Frank Capra (Dirigible), Michael Curtiz (Doctor X), Raoul Walsh (The Bowery), and Vincente Minnelli. The book’s—and Wray’s—counterpart: Robert Riskin, considered one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. Academy Award–winning writer (nominated for five), producer, ten-year-long collaborator with Frank Capra on such pictures as American Madness, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon, and Meet John Doe, hailed by many, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, as “among the best screenwriters in the business.” Riskin wrote women characters who were smart, ornery, sexy, always resilient, as he perfected what took full shape in It Happened One Night, the Riskin character, male or female—breezy, self-made, streetwise, optimistic, with a sense of humor that is subtle and sure. Fay Wray and Robert Riskin lived large lives, finding each other after establishing their artistic selves and after each had had many romantic attachments—Wray, an eleven-year-long difficult marriage and a fraught affair with Clifford Odets, and Riskin, a series of romances with, among others, Carole Lombard, Glenda Farrell, and Loretta Young. Here are Wray’s and Riskin’s lives, their work, their fairy-tale marriage that ended so tragically. Here are their dual, quintessential American lives, ultimately and blissfully intertwined.

The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers

The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers PDF Author: Mark T. Conard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813138698
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
“Written for both fans of the Coen brothers and the philosophically curious, without the technical language . . . educational and entertaining.” —Library Journal Joel and Ethan Coen have made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, but no matter what genre they’re playing with, they consistently focus on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To borrow a phrase from Barton Fink, all Coen films explore “the life of the mind” and show that the human condition can often be simultaneously comic and tragic, profound and absurd. The essays in this book explore the challenging moral and philosophical terrain of the Coen repertoire. Several address how Coen films often share film noir’s essential philosophical assumptions: power corrupts, evil is real, and human control of fate is an illusion. In Fargo, not even Minnesota’s blankets of snow can hide Jerry Lundegaard’s crimes or brighten his long, dark night of the soul. The tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce in Intolerable Cruelty transcends the plight of the characters to illuminate competing theories of justice. Even in lighter fare, such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, the comedy emerges from characters’ journeys to the brink of an amoral abyss. However, the Coens often knowingly and gleefully subvert conventions and occasionally offer symbolic rebirths and other hopeful outcomes. At the end of The Big Lebowski, for example, the Dude abides, his laziness has become a virtue, and the human comedy is perpetuating itself with the promised arrival of a newborn Lebowski. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers sheds new light on the work of these cinematic visionaries. From Blood Simple to No Country for Old Men, the Coens’ characters look for answers—though in some cases, their quest for answers leads, at best, only to more questions.

A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself PDF Author: William Boyle
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643131176
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Goodfellas meets Thelma and Louise when an unlikely trio of women in New York find themselves banding together to escape the clutches of violent figures from their pasts. After Brooklyn mob widow Rena Ruggiero hits her eighty-year-old neighbor Enzio in the head with an ashtray when he makes an unwanted move on her, she embarks on a bizarre adventure. Taking off in Enzio’s ’62 Impala, she retreats to the Bronx home of her estranged daughter, Adrienne, and her granddaughter, Lucia, only to be turned away by Adrienne at the door. Their neighbor, Lacey “Wolfie” Wolfstein, a one-time Golden Age porn star and retired Florida Suncoast grifter, takes Rena in and befriends her. When Lucia discovers that Adrienne is planning to hit the road with her ex-boyfriend Richie, she figures Rena’s her only way out of a life on the run with a mother she can’t stand. But Richie has massacred a few members of the Brancaccio crime family for a big payday, and he drags even more trouble into the mix in the form of an unhinged enforcer named Crea. The stage is set for an explosion that will propel Rena, Wolfie, and Lucia down a strange path, each woman running from something and unsure what comes next. A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself is a screwball noir about finding friendship and family where you least expect it, in which William Boyle again draws readers into the familiar—and sometimes frightening—world in the shadows at the edges of New York’s neighborhoods.

Passing Strange

Passing Strange PDF Author: Ellen Klages
Publisher: Tordotcom
ISBN: 0765389517
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Inspired by the pulps, film noir, and screwball comedy, Passing Strange is a story as unusual and complex as San Francisco itself from World Fantasy Award winning author Ellen Klages, and a finalist for the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novella San Francisco in 1940 is a haven for the unconventional. Tourists flock to the cities within the city: the Magic City of the World’s Fair on an island created of artifice and illusion; the forbidden city of Chinatown, a separate, alien world of exotic food and nightclubs that offer “authentic” experiences, straight from the pages of the pulps; and the twilight world of forbidden love, where outcasts from conventional society can meet. Six women find their lives as tangled with each other’s as they are with the city they call home. They discover love and danger on the borders where magic, science, and art intersect. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System

Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System PDF Author: Thomas Schatz
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The central thesis of this book is that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing and appreciating the Hollywood cinema. Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied by the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century.

Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures PDF Author: Bernard F. Dick
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813196132
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Drawing on previously untapped archival materials including letters, interviews, and more, Bernard F. Dick traces the history of Columbia Pictures, from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company, through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and ending with a vivid portrait of today's corporate Hollywood. The book offers unique perspectives on the careers of Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday, a discussion of Columbia's unique brands of screwball comedy and film noir, and analyses of such classics as The Awful Truth, Born Yesterday, and From Here to Eternity. Following the author's highly readable studio chronicle are fourteen original essays by leading film scholars that follow Columbia's emergence from Poverty Row status to world class, and the stars, films, genres, writers, producers, and directors responsible for its transformation. A new essay on Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood rounds out the collection and brings this seminal studio history into the 21st century. Amply illustrated with film stills and photos of stars and studio heads, Columbia Pictures is the first book to integrate history with criticism of a single studio, and is ideal for film lovers and scholars alike.