A Book Review by Maysaa H. Jaber. Adds a human, sometimes tragic face to those at the heart of moviemaking during the Golden Age.” Laura Wagner’s Hollywood Boozers, Brawlers and Hard-Luck Cases: Fifteen Ill-Fated Actors of the Golden Age (McFarland, 2025) takes readers on a journey of rediscovering the life […]
Van Helsing’s Key: The Latin Reading in Dracula (1931)
By Nicholas Goodhue. As far as I can discover, none of the commentators on the film have satisfactorily explained the meaning and importance of the film’s Latin passage…. However, the passage does in fact provide the basis for Van Helsing’s conclusion regarding his analysis of Renfield’s blood.” About thirty minutes […]
Reading Between the Lines: An Interview with Biographer Carl Rollyson
By William Blick. I do not ask myself what information is available about a figure or would they cooperate. Rather, I ask myself, what is in my own experience or what do I think I know about this figure? What qualifies me to write about this person? That is what […]
Her Own Star – Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away
A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. Author Christopher McKittrick makes a persuasive case for celebrating the consummate professional Miles became rather than mourning the icon she never was….” It says a lot about the fickleness of celebrity that an actress who has worked with some of the industry’s biggest […]
Syncretized Equality: Judge Priest, Early American Music, and Singing on the Front Porch
By Richmond B. Adams. John Ford’s Will Rogers vehicle has yet to receive the full credit for the complexities of its cultural commentary…. the present examination will argue that Judge Priest undermines the world it supposedly affirms.” From the middle-1920s through his death in 1946, my maternal grandfather, the Reverend […]
Round Like a Circle in a Spiral: The Poster Art of Film Noir (Preview)
By Marlisa Santos. As the movie-viewing public was becoming more comfortable with these kinds of filmic depictions, poster art, never to shy away from marketing hooks, aimed to tantalize prospective audiences with images that promised entrance into a suspenseful world of increasingly commonplace criminality and subversion of systemic stability…. University […]
Hollywood’s Star of Stars – Ferocious Ambition: Joan Crawford’s March to Stardom
A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr. More than a mere biography with chronological touchstones and historical anecdotes (though there are plenty of those, and they’re fascinating), it is also a psychological profile delving into the inner motivations of its subject, and a lavishly illustrated assessment of how a Golden […]
The Grand and the Personal – King Vidor in Focus: On the Filmmaker’s Artistry and Vision
A Book Review by William Blick. Informative, erudite, and comprehensive in several ways, with exhaustively precise details of Vidor’s career.” When I opened the pages of Kevin Stoehr and Cullen Gallagher’s new book, King Vidor in Focus (McFarland, 2024), I was immediately drawn to Vidor’s “Creed and Pledge” in the […]
Notes on Anatole Litvak’s City for Conquest (1940) and the Tough Vulnerability of James Cagney
By Theresa Rodewald. City for Conquest revitalizes the sports drama formula: losing does not break Danny.” Danny is a truck driver, a boxer, a brother to Eddie (Arthur Kennedy) and a boyfriend to Peggy (Ann Sheridan). He drives a truck to earn money, to pay the rent and put food […]
Everyone’s Cinema Scholar: Remembering David Bordwell (1947-2024)
Film International editors, contributors, and correspondents offer personal tributes and commentary on the late scholar of cinema. I regret never having the pleasure of meeting David Bordwell. My only interaction with him was a lively email exchange little over 10 years ago. I was planning an article on the early […]