Majestic Hollywood

1939 was a watershed year. The Great Depression was barely over; economics, politics, and culture braced for war. There was a lull before the storm and Hollywood, as if expecting to be judged by posterity, produced a portfolio of classics. No year before or since has yielded so many beloved works of cinematic art: The Hunch-back of Notre Dame, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings, Destry Rides Again, Beau Geste, Wuthering Heights, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Dark Victory, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Women, and of course, Gone With the Wind. 1939: Hollywood's Greatest Year showcases fifty films from this landmark year, with insightful text on the cultural significance of each movie and entertaining plot descriptions. Also included are stories from the legendary artists who made the films: directors William Wellman and John Ford; cinematographers Arthur Miller and Lee Garmes; actors Judy Garland, Rosalind Russell, Ray Milland, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Olivia de Havilland. This world of entertainment is illustrated by rarely seen images. Made during the most glamorous era in movie history, whether scene stills, behind-the-scenes candids, portraits, or poster art, the photos are as distinctive, evocative, and powerful as the films they were meant to publicize. Presenting the best of these images and the stories behind them, this book is a cavalcade of unforgettable films from 1939: Hollywood's Greatest Year.

Examines how Hollywood responded to and reflected the political and social changes that America experienced during the 1930sIn the popular imagination, 1930s Hollywood was a dream factory producing escapist movies to distract the American people from the greatest economic crisis in their nations history. But while many films of the period conform to this stereotype, there were a significant number that promoted a message, either explicitly or implicitly, in support of the political, social and economic change broadly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal programme. At the same time, Hollywood was in the forefront of challenging traditional gender roles, both in terms of movie representations of women and the role of women within the studio system. With case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great Depression impacted on Hollywood and how it responded to them.Topics covered include:How Hollywood offered positive representations of working womenCongressional investigations of big-studio monopolization over movie distributionHow three different types of musical genres related in different ways to the Great Depression the Warner Bros Great Depression Musicals of 1933, the Astaire/Rogers movies, and the MGM akids musicals of the late 1930sThe problems of independent production exemplified in King Vidors Our Daily BreadCary Grants success in developing a debonair screen persona amid Depression conditionsContributors Harvey G. Cohen, King's College LondonPhilip John Davies, British LibraryDavid Eldridge, University of HullPeter William Evans, Queen Mary, University of LondonMark Glancy, Queen Mary University of LondonIna Rae Hark, University of South CarolinaIwan Morgan, University College LondonBrian Neve, University of BathIan Scott, University of ManchesterAnna Siomopoulos, Bentley UniversityJ. E. Smyth, University of WarwickMelvyn Stokes, University College LondonMark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University

Beginning with Thomas Edison's aggressive copyright disputes and concluding with recent lawsuits against YouTube, Hollywood's Copyright Wars follows the struggle of the film, television, and digital media industries to influence and adapt to copyright law. Though much of Hollywood's engagement with the law occurs offstage, in the larger theater of copyright, many of Hollywood's most valued treasures, from Modern Times (1936) to Star Wars (1977), cannot be fully understood without appreciating their legal controversies. Peter Decherney shows that the history of intellectual property in Hollywood has not always mirrored the evolution of the law and recounts these extralegal solutions and their impact on American media and culture.

A lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age. Over the last twenty-five years, the field of cinema studies has offered a dramatic reassessment of the history of film in general and of Hollywood in particular. Writers have drawn on the methodologies of a number of disciplines—literary criticism, sociology, psychology, women's studies, and minority and gay studies—to deepen our understanding of motion pictures, the film industry, and movie theater audiences. In Hollywood's High Noon, noted film historian Thomas Cripps offers a lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age that brings the insights of recent scholarship to students and general readers. From its origin during the First World War to the beginning of its decline in the 1950s, Cripps writes, Hollywood operated as did other American industries: movies were created by a rational production system, regulated by both government and privately organized interests, and subject to the whims of a fickle marketplace. Yet these films did offer consumers something unique: in darkened movie palaces across the country,audiences projected themselves—their hopes and ideas—onto silver screens, profoundly mediating their reception of Hollywood's flickering images. Beginning with turn-of-the-century moving-picture pioneer Thomas Edison, Cripps traces the invention of Hollywood and the development of the studio system. He explores the movie-going experience, the struggle for social control over the movies through censorship, the impact of sound on the style and content of films, alternatives to Hollywood's oligopoly including "race" films and documentaries, the paradoxical predictability and subversive creativity of genre pictures, and Hollywood's self-proclaimed "shining moment" during the Second World War. Cripps concludes with a discussion of the collapse of the studio system after the war, due in equal parts to suburbanization, the emergence of television, and government anti-trust action.

Brian Donlevy (1901–1972) was an underrated film actor with surprising range and a little-heralded gift for comedy. Often typecast as a villain, he played the definitive bad guy in such films as Destry Rides Again, Union Pacific and Beau Geste (all in 1939). He showed his versatility in the title role of Preston Sturges’ political satire The Great McGinty (1940) and impressed both New York critics and the Soviet government as the cooly authoritative Major Caton in Wake Island (1942). Donlevy was fondly remembered as globe-trotting U.S. Special Agent Steve Mitchell in the television series Dangerous Assignment (1952) and as Professor Quatermass in two acclaimed science fiction films. This first ever biography of Donlevy covers his colorful early life as a boy soldier, his years playing comedy roles on Broadway and his long career in Hollywood.

Claire Trevor (1910–2000) is best remembered as the alluring blonde femme fatale in such iconic noir films as Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Raw Deal (1948). Yet she was a versatile performer who brought rare emotional depth to her art. She was effective in a range of diverse roles, from an outcast prostitute in John Ford’s classic Stagecoach (1939) to the ambitious tennis mother in Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) to the embittered wife of a landowner in William Wellman’s overlooked gem My Man and I (1952). Nominated for three Oscars, she deservedly won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Gaye Dawn, a gangster’s broken-down moll in Key Largo (1948). The author covers her life and career in detail, recognizing her as one of the finest actresses of her generation.

Iconic vistas, eerie roadside attractions and celebrity ghosts. From the stark beauty of the Mojave Desert to the haunted Santa Monica Pier, California's Route 66 is a truly spirited road trip. The road is lined with ghost towns such as Ludlow, a town that lived and died twice, and Goffs, now a dusty museum where the shades of the past walk the streets. In Barstow, a hundred-year-old rail station hosts long-dead passengers still waiting for their trains, and in Monrovia, the Aztec Hotel entertains spirits from a bygone era, as does the Pasadena Playhouse, the official state theater of California. Join author and paranormal historian Brian Clune as he explores the haunted history of the Mother Road.

What do Babes in Arms, Beau Geste, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Only Angels Have Wings, and Young Mr. Lincoln all have in common? They are all classic films released in the same year, but none of them received Academy Award nominations for best picture. Why? In that same year, Hollywood produced Dark Victory, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Ninotchka, as well as two of the most beloved films of all time, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. In 1939 Hollywood created an unprecedented number of great films, a year that has yet to be surpassed in cinematic achievement. In 1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year, Thomas S. Hischak looks at the most remarkable 365 days in film history. Arranged chronologically from January 1 to December 31, 1939, each entry covers one day and features major news events (national and international) as well as minor curiosities or news items that would prove to be more important in the future. The activities on Broadway, radio, the music business, literature, and other arts are included, as are noteworthy sporting events. Most significantly, this book provides a full description and commentary on the Hollywood movies that were released on that day. All 510 feature films from all the Hollywood studios are included in the book, along with notable shorts, cartoons, newsreels, and foreign releases. While others have looked at the movie highlights of this momentous year, Hischak evaluates Hollywood’s entire screen output of 1939, from B pictures and serial installments to the international blockbusters—and every film in between. 1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year is a captivating look at this phenomenon and will fascinate any film aficionado.