The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of The Cinema Of John Huston

An excellent survey into the career of John Huston, the actor, screenwriter & director with an informative, entertaining text. Huston's screenwriting credits feature many mega-hits such as "The Maltese Falcon"; "Sergeant York"; "High Sierra"; "The Killers"; "Jezebel"; "Murders in the Rue Morgue" among the few. But, he is best known for directing "The Maltese Falcon"; "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"; "Key Largo"; "The Asphalt Jungle"; "The African Queen" among a few. A fascinating look at his long creative career. A must-read for any Classic Movie fan.

Meet Martin Koll, the young CEO of a successful tech company that has just landed a multimillion- dollar client. Life is good. Until it isn’t. When Koll falls under suspicion of murder, all the evidence seems against him. Fortunately he has an airtight alibi – until suddenly he doesn’t. As the police gather evidence for an arrest, it falls on Koll to clear himself – to find out who has set him up, and why? Time is running out. *** A combo of classic noir and modern-day mystery, Alibi is fast-paced with not a wasted word. Martin Koll is a great lead character –unflappable, he ain’t! His alarming adventure is a totally engaging ride – like being on a roller coaster and not being able to remove your clenched hands from the grab bar! - Audrey E. Kupferberg, co-author of Angela Lansbury, Matthau: A Life, and Meet the Mertzes McCarty's protagonist, an "everyman" Philip Marlowe, casts the reader in the role of gumshoe in this modern day homage to classic detective fiction and films noir. The story unfolds in gritty black & white at a fast clip -- I loved the Evelyn character's back story and her long suffering mother. A pleasure to read. - Frank Laloggia, writer-director of Lady in White and Fear No Evil “This gritty, grimy, rain-drenched odyssey of New York cranks into high gear from the first page and barely gives the reader a chance to draw breath. Told in a rollercoaster first-person narrative by a murder suspect turned reluctant detective, Alibi is a gripping modern noir that balances hard-boiled sleuthing with a palpable air of paranoia and desperation. Cops, dames and an unstoppable avenging hero populate this bleak landscape - a milieu that John McCarty embraces with a tip of the fedora to Dashiell Hammett whilst simultaneously crafting a wholly plausible evolution of the genre.” - Tony Earnshaw, author of An Actor and a Rare One - Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes

Few films have had the impact or retained the popularity of The Maltese Falcon. An unexpected hit upon its release in 1941, it helped establish the careers of John Huston and Humphrey Bogart while also helping both to transform the detective genre of movies and to create film noir. This volume includes an introduction by its editor and a shot-by-shot continuity of the film, as well as essays on its production, on literary and film traditions it drew upon, and on its reputation and influence over the last half century. Included are reviews from the time of the film's original release, the enthusiastic French response in 1946 that helped define film noir, and a close formal anaylsis of the film. In addition, the volume contains a comparison of this version to earlier film versions of the Dashiell Hammett novel, and helpful explorations of cultural, historical, and psychoanalytic issues. Like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon has attained iconic status; this volume will contribute to the pleasure its many fans find in viewing the film again and again. William Luhr is a professor of English at St. Peter's College in New Jersey. He is the author of Raymond Chandler and Film and co-author of Blake Edwards and other books.

During the Great Depression, pulp fiction writers created a new, distinctly American detective story, one that stressed the development of fascinating, often bizarre characters rather than the twists and turns of clever plots. This new crime fiction adapted brilliantly to the screen, birthing a cinematic genre that French cinema intellectuals following World War II christened “film noir.” Set on dark streets late at night, in cheap hotels and bars, and populated by the dangerous people who frequented these locales, these films introduced a new antihero, a tough, brooding, rebellious loner, embodied by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. This volume provides a detailed exploration of film noir, tracing its evolution, the influence of such legendary writers as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and the films that propelled this dark genre to popularity in the mid-20th century.

When a work of art shows an interest in its own status as a work of art--either by reference to itself or to other works--we have become accustomed to calling this move meta. While scholars and critics have, for decades, acknowledged reflexivity in films, it is only in Metacinema, for the first time, that a group of leading and emerging film theorists join to enthusiastically debate the meanings and implications of the meta for cinema. In new essays on generative films, including Rear Window, 8 1/2, Holy Motors, Funny Games, Fight Club, and Clouds of Sils Maria, contributors chart, explore, and advance the ways in which metacinema is at once a mode of filmmaking and a heuristic for studying cinematic attributes. What results is not just an engagement with certain practices and concepts in widespread use in the movies (from Hollywood to global cinema, from documentary to the experimental and avant-garde), but also the development of a veritable and vital new genre of film studies. With more and more films expressing reflexivity, recursion, reference to other films, mise-en-abîme, seriality, and exhibiting related intertextual and intermedial traits, the time is overdue for the kind of capacious yet nuanced critical study found in Metacinema.

This work offers a theoretical introduction to the portrayal of medievalism in popular film. Employing the techniques of film criticism and theory, it moves beyond the simple identification of error toward a poetics of this type of film, sensitive to both cinema history and to the role these films play in constructing what the author terms the “medieval imaginary.” The opening two chapters introduce the rapidly burgeoning field of medieval film studies, viewed through the lenses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Deleuzian philosophy of the time-image. The first chapter explores how a vast array of films (including both auteur cinema and popular movies) contributes to the modern vision of life in the Middle Ages, while the second is concerned with how time itself functions in cinematic representations of the medieval. The remaining five chapters offer detailed considerations of specific examples of representations of medievalism in recent films, including First Knight, A Knight’s Tale, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Kingdom of Heaven, King Arthur, Night Watch, and The Da Vinci Code. The book also surveys important benchmarks in the development of Deleuze’s time-image, from classic examples like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Kurosawa’s Kagemusha through contemporary popular cinema, in order to trace how movie medievalism constructs images of the multivalence of time in memory and representation. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

The first comprehensive cultural history of Brazil to be written in English, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present captures the role of the artistic imaginary in shaping Brazil's national identity. Analyzing representations of Brazil throughout the world, this ambitious survey demonstrates the ways in which life in one of the world's largest nations has been conceived and revised in visual arts, literature, film, and a variety of other media. Beginning with the first explorations of Brazil by the Portuguese, Darlene J. Sadlier incorporates extensive source material, including paintings, historiographies, letters, poetry, novels, architecture, and mass media to trace the nation's shifting sense of its own history. Topics include the oscillating themes of Edenic and cannibal encounters, Dutch representations of Brazil, regal constructs, the literary imaginary, Modernist utopias, "good neighbor" protocols, and filmmakers' revolutionary and dystopian images of Brazil. A magnificent panoramic study of race, imperialism, natural resources, and other themes in the Brazilian experience, this landmark work is a boon to the field.

David Landau’s Film Noir Production: The Whodunit of the Classic American Mystery Film is a book meant for those who like a good story, one the Noir Films always delivered, concentrating on the characters more than anything else. Readers will find in these pages many behind-the-scenes tales of the productions of certain hard-boiled film classics and the prime players involved in their creation, from Darryl Zanuck and Raymond Chandler to John Seitz and Billy Wilder. This book features: A clear understanding of how movies are actually made and all the creative artists that contribute, creating a better appreciation for the many talented artistic collaborators that worked in the Hollywood Studio System and who together created film noir. A behind-the-scenes look at the making of a classic film noir movie that typifies the chapter’s subject, allowing the reader to view that film in a new light and think about it from a new prospective. Appendices of suggested films to screen, film noir books for further reading, and downloadable files containing discussion points and class assignments for each chapter. An informative and conversational writing style, making the subject matter easy to digest and fun to read. This book is an indispensible companion text for anyone studying or interested in film noir, film history, the bygone days of the Hollywood film factories or how movies are actually made.