You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Sergio Leone's renown as a filmmaker rests upon a fistful of films, most notably the three Westerns he made with Clint Eastwood in the mid-1960s: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). While the success of these movies ensured Leone's reputation would endure, the few films he made following The Man with No Name Trilogy—culminating in his American gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984) with Robert DeNiro—would solidify Leone's place as one of the great visionaries of his time. In this enhanced revision of Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone, Robert C. Cumbow examines the work of this Italian filmmaker who m...
Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films such as STAGECOACH to spaghetti Westerns like A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, culture scholar Lee Clark Mitchell shows how Westerns as a genre helped assuage a series of crises in American culture by responding to fears and obsessions of its audience--particularly what it means to be a "man". 30 photos. 5 line drawings.
In an industry that celebrates extravagance and showmanship, Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer was a rarity, a man who guarded his privacy fiercely and believed that film provided a way to understand human nature by focusing on the individual person. Best known for his 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, dominated by its emotionally harrowing close-ups of Joan during her trial, it was Dreyer who pioneered some of the seminal techniques of modern film, techniques that would later be made famous by better known contemporaries such as Sergei Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith. Now, in My Only Great Passion, the first full-length English language biography of Dreyer, Jean and Dale D. Drum restore...
Spectacle, myth, fable - these words instantly leap to mind when considering director Sergio Leone's celebrated films. His popularization of the Spaghetti Western genre, through works like A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), continues to have a profound impact on filmmakers worldwide. In this exciting new study, Italian film scholar Christian Uva explores a side of Leone's works rarely before discussed: the political. Grappling with the contradictions between Leone's politically critical cinematic eye and his aversion to ideological classification, Sergio Leone: Cinema as Political Fable makes sense of how the director's internal political tensions shaped the...
William Friedkin’s film Sorcerer (1977) has been subject to a major re-evaluation in the last decade. A dark re-imagining of the French Director H.G. Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear) (1953) (based on George Arnaud’s novel); the film was a major critical and commercial failure on its initial release. Friedkin’s work was castigated as an example of directorial hubris as it was a notoriously difficult production which went wildly over-budget. It was viewed at the time as th end of New Hollywood. However, within recent years, the film has emerged in the popular and scholarly consciousness from enjoying a minor, cult status to becoming subject to a full-blown critical reconsideration in which it has been praised a major work by a key American filmmaker.
Col. George Wright’s campaign against the Yakima, Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Palouse, and other Indian peoples of eastern Washington Territory was intended to punish them for a recent attack on another U.S. Army force. Wright had once appeared to respect the Indians of the Upper Columbia Plateau, but in 1858 he led a brief war noted for its violence, bloodshed, and summary trials and executions. Today, many critics view his actions as war crimes, but among white settlers and politicians of the time, Wright was a patriotic hero who helped open the Inland Northwest to settlement. “Hang Them All” offers a comprehensive account of Wright’s campaigns and explores the controversy surroundin...
This unique collection of interviews covers the broad spectrum of film directing experience--from first timers to award-winning veterans. Allowed to respond with anonymity, the directors provide candid answers to a wide variety of topics that convey the challenges and rewards of the filmmaking process.
By the end of the 1960s, the Hollywood West of Tom Mix, Randolph Scott, and even John Wayne was passé—or so the story goes. Many film historians and critics have argued that movies portraying a mythic American West gave way to revisionist films that influential filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman made as violent critiques of the Western’s “golden years.” Yet rumors surrounding the death of the Western have been greatly exaggerated, says film historian Andrew Patrick Nelson. Even as the Wild Bunch and John McCabe rode forth, John Wayne remained the Western’s number one box office draw. How, then, could there have been a revisionist reckoning at a time when the Duke w...
None