Matthew Kennedy is curator and host of the CinemaLit Film Series at the Mechanics Library in San Francisco. He is the author of Marie Dressler: A Biography (McFarland, 1999), Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory: Hollywood's Genius Bad Boy (University Press of Wisconsin, 2004), Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 2007), and Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2014). Go here for more on Matthew and his oeuvre. 
Actors & Personalities · Books
Big picture book is a fun peruse for cineastes * * * Stephen Tapert’s Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women (2020, Rutgers University Press, 504 pages) is a coffee[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama
Everyone in Shampoo is id driven, with the audience taking voyeuristic pleasure at the absence of any self-awareness. George is inarticulate and largely passive, more preyed upon than preying with[…]
Nearly fifty years after its release, it’s clear Midnight Cowboy pulled off a neat trick. Its story of a naïve “Texas longhorn bull” hustler and a low-rent con man is[…]
Haynes spares us slack-jawed bug-eyed Spielbergian reactions shots, but he also denies us deep emotional engagement. The visuals shadow and overwhelm the actors as they wander the bustling Haynes-Selznick landscapes.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words makes clear that her life was messy and episodic, but she earned great love from her directors, co-stars, and family. Don’t wait for Mommie[…]
There is some originality in this orgy of borrowing, with easy references to touch screens, cell phones, and an interracial marriage, but all with a constant backward orientation. La La[…]
Books · Exploitation & Erotica
Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange – How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos, by Robert Hofler. New York: HarperCollins, 2014. Hardcover, $27.99 When Michael[…]
The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century, by Margaret Talbot. New York: Riverhead/Penguin Group, paperback, 2013, 432pp, $18.00. Margaret Talbot must have known a straight-ahead biography or “a[…]
Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips, by Michael Ankerich. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. Hardcover. $40.00. Not too many remember Mae Murray. Not a one of her[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s big fruitcake of a book, Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century from HarperCollins, is hard to take too seriously.[…]
America’s Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, by Daniel Eagan. Trade paperback $39.95. New York: Continuum Pub. Group. ISBN 0-826-42977-7. The National[…]
Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, by Mitchell Zuckoff. New York: Knopf, 2009. Hardcover, $35.00. 576pp. ISBN 0-30726-768-7. Mitchell Zuckoff did a clever thing in Robert Altman The Oral Biography. He captured[…]
Thank Heaven: A Memoir, by Leslie Caron. New York: Viking, 2009. Paperback $25.95, 288pp. ISBN: 0-67002-134-2. When Leslie Caron came to Los Angeles in 2009 on a book tour for her[…]
America’s Film Vault: A Reference Guide to the Motion Pictures Held by the U.S. National Archives, by Phillip W. Stewart. Crestview FL: PMS Press, 2009. Trade paperback, $39.95. 308pp. ISBN: 0-979-32430-0.[…]
A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler, by Victoria Sturtevant. Carbondale, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Trade paperback, $24.00. 208pp. ISBN: 0-252-07622-2. When Canadian writer Betty[…]
Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited, by Molly Haskell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Hardcover $24.00. 272pp. ISBN: 0-30011-752-3. In a pique of literary inspiration, Yale[…]
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years, by Cari Beauchamp. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2009. Hardcover $35.00. 528pp. ISBN: 1-400-04000-0. Previous books on Joseph Patrick Kennedy, of which there are many,[…]
“In the ensuing post-Stonewall civil rights struggles, The Boys in the Band became crazy Aunt Betty locked in the attic when guests came over.”
Two golden-age musicals get the deluxe treatment
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood Mark Harris. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Cloth, $27.95, 496pp. ISBN 1-594-20152-8. Observers of the Academy Awards[…]
