From Scarface to Scarlett: American Films in the 1930s

By Roger Dooley

Book Overview

Paperback, 648 pages Published November 1st 1984 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156339986
• ISBN13: 9780156339988
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 704 Pages
• Weight: 3.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

HANDS DOWN THE GREATEST BOOK ON 1930's MOVIES

I have loved this book for almost 25 years now!! It is the most enjoyable, most informative book ever written by a single author on an era in motion pictures and how lucky we are that it was written on the greatest era of films, the 1930's!! It's a huge book packed with information and commentary on films of the era. What is truly astonishing is that the author wrote this book on superb history and criticism on these era of films years before Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics were on the air, primarily from local television airings, revival houses in New York, and research!! Wonderfully packed with information and highly readable, by the time you finish this book you will rightfully feel you can hold your own with anyone if the topic in 1930's Hollywood films. There aren't that many photographs, but you can easily get that elsewhere, finding such superb detailed yet unpretentious writing on the period is the true attraction. Dooley truly enjoys the films of the era but he is not blind to the failings of weaker films or films that no longer hold up (and you will be quite grateful that he rarely gives away "spoilers" when discussing the films unlike many a historian). He writes with appreciation of the pace of the films, the sharp dialogue and charismatic performances of these superb films which he bluntly (and truthfully!) states was Hollywood's finest era. What a shame the talented Mr. Dooley, a novelist, never again wrote a book on film history because he truly takes his place with the greats on the basis on this single volume. If you love "classic movies" you can be certain you will love this book!

From the Back Cover:

This mammoth, all-inclusive history of American film in the 1930's with almost 200 stills, portraits, and other photographs examines the film output of that legendary decade in its entirely - five thousand movies, most of them personally screened by the author. His skillful division of this mass of cinema into fifty distinct genres - gangster films, horror films, spy pictures, screwball comedies, campus capers, and westerns among them - combines fun criticism, facts, trivia, and social history re-creates a fascinating era for the movie nut, film buff, and cinema scholar. It is the essential volume on that memorable decade and its golden legacy.