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. Criterion serves up two more deep-dish DVDs from yesteryear Sullivan’s Travels (1941) Hollywood’s self-exams are usually dipped in acid: What Price Hollywood?, A Star is Born, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad[…]
Documentaries · Noir · Reviews
In DVD land, the world’s your oyster – pearls included (sometimes) Cuban Story (Victor Pahlen, 1959) By the mid-1950s, Errol Flynn was enjoying the low high life of a bloated[…]
The Criterion Collection offers another scrumptious golden-era DVD Criterion has spruced up the peerless 1936 Universal comedy My Man Godfrey and given it a bright new sheen. The digital transfer[…]
Check out these two favorites from Czech cinema’s Age of Camelot Those who fondly remember grainy, popping, and cloudy prints of old foreign films will be happy to know that[…]
The Criterion Collection serves up two Sirk beauties With the 2001 release of All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, two gorgeous DVDs from the elite Criterion Collection,[…]
Actors Talk: Profiles and Stories from the Acting Trade, by Dennis Brown. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999. 280 pages, $25.00, ISBN 0-87910-287-X. I hate watching actors talk about acting. Humor, intelligence, and[…]
My Son Divine, by Frances Milstead, with Kevin Heffernan and Steve Yeager. New York: Alyson Books, 2001. 256 pages, $18.95. ISBN 1555835945 Divine has been dead for 13 years, and[…]
The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece, by Jan Stuart. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. 366 pages, $26.00 Fans of 1975’s Nashville, of which there are many, have reasons[…]
