Author Archive for: ‘Geoff Mayer’
A Parallel Universe? Hollywood in the “Pre-code Era”
Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. ISBN 0 231 11094 4 430 pp. A$37.95 Uploaded 1 March 2000 In the early 1990s Turner Entertainment began releasing a series of Hollywood films produced during the “Pre-Code” (1930-1934) period under their “Forbidden Hollywood” banner. The term “Pre-Code”, however, was not strictly accurate …
Read MoreLee Robinson (1923 – 2003)
In the 1950s the Australian public had little or no interest in supporting an Australian film industry. In fact, as Lee Robinson remarked some years later in an interview with Graham Shirley, if the public were aware that a feature film was Australian it meant death at the box-office: ‘To put an Australian tag on it [an Australian feature film] …
Read MoreHollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail
Peter Stanfield, Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001. ISBN: 0 85989 694 3 (pb) £18.99 ISBN: 0 85989 693 5 (hb) £47.50 272pp (Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press) John Wayne, after nearly a decade of low budget westerns, finally emerged from Poverty row films with the release of John Ford’s Stagecoach in February …
Read MoreMelodrama and Modernity. Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity. Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 ISBN: 0 231 113293 256 pp US$24.50 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) One of the best films released in the past twelve months was Far from Heaven (USA/France, 2002), Todd Haynes’s reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (USA, 1955) – with additional themes, …
Read MoreJacques Tourneur.The Cinema of Nightfall
Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur.The Cinema of Nightfall. John Hopkins University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0801865611 344pp US$18.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press) Uploaded 20 September 2002 I Walked With a Zombie (1943), the sixth film directed by Jacques Tourneur, is one of the great American films. I have been waiting many years to write that. Although there has …
Read MoreThe British Cinema Book
Robert Murphy (ed) The British Cinema Book London: BFI, 1997. ISBN 0-85170-641-X. 279pp. A$39.95 (paper) Uploaded 16 April 1999 British director Stephen Frears, in his affirmation of British cinema in the television documentary Typically British , cited Francois Truffaut’s observation that there was a certain incompatibility between the words “British” and “Cinema”. Frears response was “bollocks to Truffaut” and this …
Read MoreA Night to Remember: The Definitive Titanic Film
Jeffrey Richards, A Night to Remember: The Definitive Titanic Film. London, I.B. Tauris, 2003. ISBN: 1 86064 849 5 136pp £2.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) Jeffrey Richards loves Roy Baker’s A Night to Remember. Of all the films which have used the historical events and characters involved in that fateful night of April 14/15, 1912, when the largest ship in …
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