When Hollywood Loved Britain

When Hollywood Loved Britain examines the Hollywood "British" film--American feature films that were set in Britain, based on British history or literature and included the work of British producers, directors, writers and actors. "British" films include many of the most popular and memorable films of the 1930s and 1940s, yet they have received little individual attention from film historians and even less attention as a body of films. While the book is centered on wartime "British" films, it also investigates wider issues: the influence of censorship and propaganda agencies during Hollywood’s studio era, studio finances, the isolationist campaign in the United States between 1939 and 1941, and American perceptions of Britain at war.

This work examines the Hollywood British film - ie. American features that were set in Britain, based on British history or literature and included the work of British producers, directors, writers and actors.

For 100 years, Hollywood has provided both the majority and the most popular of films shown on British screens. For many Britons, Hollywood films are not foreign films. Whether seen in the cinema, on television or the internet, they are regarded as normal screen fare and a part of everyday life. Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain is the first book to take a wide ranging view of this phenomenon, exploring the tastes and preferences of British audiences from the silent era to the present. Mark Glancy investigates the British reception of Hollywood films, ranging from The Public Enemy through film history to The Patriot and Grease. Drawing on rich original sources, his carefully researched and lively book explores Hollywood's capacity to appeal to British audiences, as well as its ability to alienate, enrage and amuse them.

Drawing on new archival research into Hollywood production history and detailed analysis of individual films, Hollywood and the Invention of England examines the surprising affinity for the English past in Hollywood cinema. Stubbs asks why Hollywood filmmakers have so frequently drawn on images and narratives depicting English history, and why films of this type have resonated with audiences in America. Beginning with an overview of the cultural interaction between American film and English historical culture, the book proceeds to chart the major filmmaking cycles which characterise Hollywood's engagement with the English past from the 1930s to the present, assessing the value of English-themed films in the American film industry while also placing them in a broader historical context.

British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-1965 calls attention to the shifting grounds of cultural expression by highlighting Hollywood as a site that unsettled definitions and narratives of colonialism and national identity for prominent British novelists such as Christopher Isherwood, P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and J.B. Priestley.

This book is about the emigration, film careers and socio-cultural influence of British filmmakers moving to Hollywood in the studio era. It deals with some of the unknown and neglected émigrés, as well as the leading lights who founded, initiated and ensured that American film became the leading national cinema of the twentieth century.

The first biography to be based on Grant's own personal papers, Cary Grant: the making of a Hollywood legend provides a definitive account of the professional and personal life of one of Hollywood's most unforgettable, influential stars.

This book offers a different take on the early history of Warner Bros., the studio renowned for introducing talking pictures and developing the gangster film and backstage musical comedy. The focus here is on the studio’s sustained commitment to produce films based on stage plays. This led to the creation of a stock company of talented actors, to the introduction of sound cinema, to the recruitment of leading Broadway stars such as John Barrymore and George Arliss and to films as diverse as The Gold Diggers (1923), The Marriage Circle (1924), Beau Brummel (1924), Disraeli (1929), Lilly Turner (1933), The Petrified Forest (1936) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Even the most crippling effects of the Depression in 1933 did not prevent Warners’ production of films based on stage plays, many being transformed into star vehicles for the likes of Ruth Chatterton, Leslie Howard and Bette Davis.