Kirjahaku

Well known for his slapstick comedic style, Jerry Lewis has also delighted worldwide movie audiences with a directing career spanning five decades. One of American cinema's great innovators, Lewis made unmistakably personal films that often focused on an ideal masculine image and an anarchic, manic acting out of the inability to assume this image. Films such as The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, Three on a Couch, and The Big Mouth present a series of thematic variations on this tension, in which such questions as how to be a man, how to be popular, and how to maintain relationships are posed within frameworks that set up a liberating and exhilarating confusion of roles and norms. The Nutty Professor and The Patsy are especially profound and painful examinations of the difficulty experienced by Lewis's character in reconciling loving himself and being loved by others. With sharp, concise observations, Chris Fujiwara examines this visionary director of self-referential comedic masterpieces. The book also includes an enlightening interview with Lewis that offers unique commentary on the creation and study of comedy.

Otto Preminger was one of Hollywood's first truly independent producer/directors. Blazing a trail in the examination of controversial issues such as drug addiction (The Man with the Golden Arm) and homosexuality (Advise and Consent), Preminger broke the censorship of the Hollywood Production Code and the blacklist, while creating some of Hollywood's most enduring film noir classics. Chris Fujiwara's critical biography - the first in more than thirty years - follows Preminger throughout his varied career, penetrating his carefully constructed public persona and revealing the many layers of his work.

At least three of director Jacques Tourneur's films--Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man--are recognized as horror classics. Yet his contributions to these films are often minimized by scholars, with most of the credit going to the films' producer, Val Lewton. A detailed examination of the director's full body of work reveals that those elements most evident in the Tourneur-Lewton collaborations--the lack of monsters and the stylized use of suggested violence--are equally apparent in Tourneur's films before and after his work with Lewton. Mystery and sensuality were hallmarks of his style, and he possessed a highly artistic visual and aural style. This insightful critical study examines each of Tourneur's films, as well as his extensive work on MGM shorts (1936-1942) and in television. What emerges is evidence of a highly coherent directorial style that runs throughout Tourneur's works.

Otto Preminger was one of Hollywood's first truly independent producer-directors. He sought to address the major social, political, and historical questions of his time in films designed to appeal to a wide public. Blazing a trail in the examination of controversial issues such as drug addiction ("The Man with the Golden Arm") and homosexuality ("Advise & Consent") and in the frank, sophisticated treatment of adult material ("Anatomy of a Murder"), Preminger broke the censorship of the Hollywood Production Code and the blacklist. He also made some of Hollywood's most enduring film noir classics, including "Laura" and "Fallen Angel." More than anyone else, Preminger represented the transition from the Hollywood of the studios to the decentralized, wheeling-and-dealing New Hollywood of today. Chris Fujiwara's "studious, informative, often astutely argued" (Gerald Peary, "The Phoenix") biography follows Preminger throughout his varied career, penetrating his carefully constructed public persona and revealing the many layers of his work.