Kirjahaku

The Jolson Story, a landmark Hollywood musical biography, brought has-been blackface singer Al Jolson one of show business' great comebacks, made a star of Larry Parks, the young "B" movie actor who played him, and spawned a sequel. For the first time, McClelland tells the story of how these films were made. Subsequently, in the anti-Communist climate of 1951 America, Larry Parks's career was destroyed when he admitted he had been a Communist. The story of Parks's downfall is a major section of the book, as is the graphic portrayal of that dark period in American history. With biographical profiles of all significant contributors to the Jolson sagas and many rare photos.

This is the first book on enduring Hollywood star Eleanor Parker, long underrated despite three best actress Academy Award nominations (Caged, 1950; Detective Story, 1951; Interrupted Melody, 1955). Parker was a beauty as well as a versatile actress, and her achievements approach those of more publicized colleagues Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. With Parker's blessing and her son Paul Clemens' cooperation, Doug McClelland has written one of the most thorough examinations of a film star's career. The book is valuable to librarians, academies, and film enthusiasts for its extensive documentation and analyses of all of Parker's work, for the bibliographies of her coverage in books and periodicals, for the portrait of a glamorous, creative era in filmmaking, and for the insights into the careers of Eleanor Parker's associates, many among the most heavily researched motion picture artists of cinema's "Golden Age." The book contains a forward by noted screenwriter William Ludwig, who won an Academy Award for Parker's Interrupted Melody, and afterword by Marjorie Lawrence, the opera singer whom Parker portrayed in Interrupted Melody, and photos of Eleanor Parker that show her in many of her "thousand faces."