This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards assesses the contributions to the genre of directors, designers and fencing masters, as well as of the stars themselves, and devotes several chapters to the principal subjects if the swashbucklers - pirates, highwaymen, cavaliers and knights. The result is to recall, however fleetingly, the golden days of the silver screen. Reviews of the original edition: 'An intelligent, scholarly, well-written account of adventure films, this work is sensitive...
This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards assess...
Film is an important source of social history, as well as having been a popular art form from the early twentieth century. This study shows how a society, consciously or unconsciously, is mirrored in its cinema. It considers the role of the cinema in dramatizing popular beliefs and myths, and takes three case studies American populism, British imperialism, German Nazism to explain how a nation s pressures, tensions and hopes come through in its films. Examining the American cinema is accomplished by analysing the careers of three great directors, John Ford, Frank Capra and Leo McCarey,...
Film is an important source of social history, as well as having been a popular art form from the early twentieth century. This study shows how a s...
The Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a pioneering independent effort aimed at education, specialised in material about everyday life in Britain and recorded material through a panel of around 500 volunteer observers who maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires known as directives.
The collection of papers on film is one of the largest collections on a single theme produced by Mass-Observation but before this book was originally published in 1987 very little of the film material had been put into print. This anthology presents a...
The Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a pioneering independent effort aimed at education, specialised in materia...
This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards assesses the contributions to the genre of directors, designers and fencing masters, as well as of the stars themselves, and devotes several chapters to the principal subjects if the swashbucklers pirates, highwaymen, cavaliers and knights. The result is to recall, however fleetingly, the golden days of the silver screen.
Reviews of the original edition:
An intelligent, scholarly, well-written account of adventure films, this work...
This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards ass...
There's a folk memory of China in which numberless yellow hordes pour out of the 'mysterious East' to overwhelm the vulnerable West, accompanied by a stereotype of the Chinese as cruel, cunning and depraved. Hollywood films played their part in perpetuating these myths and stereotypes that constituted 'The Yellow Peril'. Jeffrey Richards examines in detail how and why they did it. He shows how the negative image was embodied in recurrent cinematic depictions of opium dens, tong wars, sadistic dragon ladies and corrupt warlords and how, in the 1930s and 1940s, a countervailing positive image...
There's a folk memory of China in which numberless yellow hordes pour out of the 'mysterious East' to overwhelm the vulnerable West, accompanied by a ...
