With the possible exception of the Western movie and Film Noir, the American screwball comedy, that hilarious, often chaotic and highly witty style of making excellent and funny entertainment, probably is the third best liked or popular genre associated with movies made in 1940s US. It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) is very likely […]
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Category: B. R. PopCulture
Anymore for Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story by Caroline and David Stafford (2023)
Authors Catherine and David Stafford’s new title on one of Britain’s most important bass players, Ronnie Lane (1946-1997), successfully fills some information gaps rock music lovers may have encountered, concerning show biz and London’s music scene of the 1960s and 70s. Their Anymore for Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story tells of his humble beginnings as […]
American Film Noir Genres, Characters, and Settings by Harold Hellwig (2023)
Strongly influenced by domestic hard-boiled novels of the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most American film genres, film noir, had its boom time in the 1940s. Generally believed to have mostly vanished from studios and theaters by the late 1950s, the genre briefly resurfaces every few years in the so-called “neo noirs” of various […]
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 by Scott Blackwood (2023)
One of the greatest but least researched American record labels, Paramount from Grafton, Wisconsin, is the subject of Scott Blackwood’s title at hand, that introduces itself as a blend of solid historical research, good artist presentation and a bit of fiction. Maybe it has to do with Blackwoods’s first calling as a writer of novels, […]
The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky by George Melnyk (2023)
Few other artists connected with auteur cinema have left such a record of often disturbing, mythical, surreal, and sometimes more or less incomprehensible movies as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean director extraordinaire, born in 1929. If the label “cult director” can be applied to just a few artists, he definitely is in that league. “Jodorwsky has invested […]
domus 1940-1949, 1950-1959, 1960-1969 by Charlotte & Peter Fiell (eds.) (2023)
Often reverently labeled the ultimate magazine or record of architecture and contemporary design, the Italian publication domus made history as the spectacular diary of modern and future ideas in design and architecture. Ever since 1928, when legendary Italian designer and Professor of architecture Giovanni (Gio) Ponti presented the first edition. For most of his life, […]
Perplexing Plots. Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (2023)
Generally, storytelling, narratives, modes of presentation and the story behind it, define most works of fiction and movie plots alike. As those techniques changed over the decades (as did audiences who step by step were introduced to this), new and exiting ways of shooting film and presenting characters entered popular forms of entertainment. The simple, […]
The Jordanaires: The Story of the World’s Greatest Backup Vocal Group by Gordon Stoker … (2022)
The list of famous singers with biographies is huge and gets longer almost every day. Even so, there are just a few books on those voices that built the solid, reliable and harmonic background for countless hits. It is hardly possible to imagine songs such as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” “Don’t be Cruel,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” […]
Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad by Matthew Edwards and Fernando G. Pagn...
The gialli (“the yellow ones”), introduced in Italy in the mid-1960s, were a film genre that combined all sorts of sensations, such as crimes planned and committed, detectives and amateur sleuths looking for clues, great landscapes, exotic venues, usually connected to airports and train stations, beautiful women, Gothic horror and disturbing soundtracks. In the gialli, […]