Joseph McBride is a film historian and a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He has published twenty-two books, including the 2019 Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra (Hightower Press, Berkeley). His forthcoming books include an updated edition of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (University Press of Kentucky, January 2022) and the critical study The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers (Anthem Press, March 2022). His other books include acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and John Ford and the critical study How Did Lubitsch Do It? McBride plays a film critic and historian in Welles’s film The Other Side of the Wind (2018). He received Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards nominations for co-writing the AFI’s Life Achievement Award tributes to Fred Astaire and Lillian Gish and won the WGA award for co-writing the AFI’s Life Achievement Award tribute to John Huston. 
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Actors & Personalities · Commentary · Silents
Those who affect a superior attitude toward a great artist such as Lillian Gish are not only ignorant of our cultural heritage but stubbornly unaware that art usually comes from[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · War
Naturally, Huston was furious about the film’s suppression and remained so all through the intervening years. In his words, “I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted[…]
Orson Welles’s Too Much Johnson is a youthful tribute to low comedy and reflects of his obsession with bygone times, cultural mores & means of expression.
Interviews · Writers & Critics
“He fears the ‘Party of God’ because he reads their ‘cultural elite’ and ‘family values’ rhetoric as ‘code for [attacking] the media, the Jews, the homosexuals, the adulterers, people who do not believe in God, people who are better looking than you are — put it all together, you have a poisoned chalice.'”
In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 2009. Hardcover. $24.95. 304pp. ISBN 978-1565125995. Orson Welles, as Walter Kerr wrote[…]
On Cukor, by Gavin Lambert, edited by Robert Trachtenberg. Rizzoli, 208 pp., $50.00. One day in the early 1980s, George Cukor, the octogenarian director of such celebrated Hollywood films as Dinner at[…]
