paper 0-231-11095-2 Early sound film is revealed as a morally lax medium ready for the boundaries of the Code and the steadying presence of FDR. In the opening chapter, Doherty (American and Film Studies/Brandeis; Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II, 1993) sets the scene for the wild era, showing how the Great Depression and the transition to sound technology created nervous studios and cynical, antiauthoritarian audiences. He then surveys popular genres—adventure, gangster, horror, prison, and sex movies, comedies and newsreels, preachment yarns—and illustrates the antigovernment sentiment, sexual ambiguity, and vice that dominated the screen in films such as Wild Boys of the Road, Scarface, and The Sign of the Cross. Although the Production Code was introduced in 1930, it was not until 1934, with the threat of federal regulation and the “calming equilibrium” of President Franklin Roosevelt, that it was adopted by the film industry. For studios, the code’s effects were positive: immediately after the establishment of the Production Code Administration, movie attendance increased and studios rebounded. For pre-code headliners, the effects were mixed, as Doherty’s analyses of the Marx Brothers and Mae West attest. Just as the need for national unity during the Great Depression gave reason for the Production Code, so postwar prosperity allowed Americans the personal freedom and “wider selection of moral options” that killed it. Ironically, the death knell came from a Hollywood insider: Alfred Hitchcock, with Psycho (1960), the shocking film that left the Code “walking dead.” Scholarly but at ease with a Hollywood aside or period slang, this book sits in style between Andrew Bergman’s We’re in the Money and Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness, two other codifications of film eras or genres. As for what was missed, why not have examined the pre-code continental wantonness of Lubitsch films, which make moral and criminal liberties second nature? Providing a nearly complete chronicle and casting unifying light on an unexplored era in film, this may become a standard. Useful appendices include the text of the Production Code. (67 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-231-11094-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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