50 Classic Motion Pictures: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of (Limelight) - Softcover

David Zinman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879101628 ISBN 13: 9780879101626

Publisher: Limelight, 2004

Synopsis

"A fat, lavishly illustrated run through of...50 Hollywood movies from the 1930s up to a few years after World War II...valuable and entertaining today not only as a social record but as sheer entertainment...âZinmanã begins with Mae West's classic She Done Him Wrong and touches all the cinematic landmarks, including Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and Gone with the Wind..." -Publisher's Weekly

About this title

From the Author:

Why I wrote this book.
I make no pretense about being a film scholar. I am simply a movie bum, an addict, a guy who is at home in that dream world in the dark. Why does some retread from the popcorn brigade want to write a book? My answer is that the old movies--by "old" I'm talking about pictures from the 1930s and 1940s--were made for the general public. And so, I think it is fitting for a book on them to be written with the average movie-goer in mind. Instead, most of the recent film books seem to aim at a small group of intellectuals. They have bathed us in a deluge of words discussing the "art" of the cinema in technical and aesthetic terms, terms that have no interest for the guy in the tenth row who howls at W.C. Fields and gets weepy-eyed at the end of "Casablanca." So this is an ode to the old movies, written not with the careful and sometimes acid words of a critic but with the nostalgic and sometimes adoring pen of someone who seeks to recapture the fantasy and wonder of that make-believe world on the silver screen. Readers will find a wide variety of selections. They range from such favorites as "Gone With The Wind," "Citizen Kane," and "City Lights" to pictures that are seldom listed--such as "Nightmare Alley" (Tyrone Power's favorite of all his films), "Death Takes A Holiday," and "She." There is even one serial: "Flash Gordon." On composing my list, I made only two stipulations. First, that the films came from Hollywood's golden age--the 30s and 40s. Second, that they be films that were distinguished or unique or hilarious in their day and that they also held up today. My choices may be purely personal. Still, in the end, every list has to be subjective. Obviously, there will be dissent, but this is a reader's privilege. And didn't the feller say, "If we all thought alike, we'd all be married to the same person." --David Zinman 7/3/98

Synopsis:

Hollywood movies from the 1930s up to a few years after World War Two.

About this edition

• Publisher: Limelight
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0879101628
• ISBN 13: 9780879101626
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320