In this unprecedented survey of British cinema from the 1930s to the New Wave of the 1960s, Marcia Landy explores how cinematic representation and social history converge. Landy focuses on the genre film, a product of British mass culture often dismissed by critics as "unrealistic," showing that in England such cinema subtly dramatized unresolved cultural conflicts and was, in fact, more popular than critics have claimed. Her discussion covers hundreds of works--including historical films, films of empire, war films, melodrama, comedy, science-fiction, horror, and social problem films--and reveals their relation to changing attitudes toward class, race, national identity, sexuality, and gender. Landy begins by describing the status and value of genre theory, then provides a history of British film production that illuminates the politics and personalities connected with the major studios. In vivid accounts of the films within each genre, she analyzes styles, codes, and conventions to show how the films negotiate history, fantasy, and lived experience. Throughout Landy creates a dynamic sense of genre and of how the genres shape, not merely reflect, cultural conflicts. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: Hybrid Heritage on Screen provides a long overdue thorough analysis of the 1980s 'Raj Revival'. It examines imperial nostalgia and troubled ethnic, gender and class relations during the Thatcher Era as represented in cinema and television.

On a small island off North Carolina's coast, Kate Killigrew helps Martin Donnerly, an innocent paroled felon, find the real murderer of his promiscuous wife Donna Sue

Product Description: Beginning with the premise that the biopic is a form of adaptation and an example of intermediality, this collection examines the multiplicity of 'source texts' and the convergence of different media in this genre, alongside the concurrent issues of fidelity and authenticity that accompany this form...read more

Product Description: This book explores the cinematic representation of the city in British film from 1895 to 1914, featuring depictions of London, Glasgow, Dublin, Delhi and other British colonial cities. The author argues that the films are not only an invaluable record of the economic, social and cultural life of these cities but also that the spatial organization of these urban areas, and the cinematic representations of them, were shaped by the ideology and activity of imperialism...read more

Product Description: Michael Klinger was the most successful independent producer in the British film industry over a twenty year period, from 1960 to 1980, responsible for 32 films, including classics such as Repulsion and Get Carter. Despite working with many famous figures, including Michael Caine, Claude Chabrol, Mike Hodges, Lee Marvin and Roman Polanski, Klinger's contribution to British cinema has been ignored...read more

Product Description: Is there more to 1970s British cinema than sex, horror and James Bond? This lively account argues that this is definitely the case and explores the cultural landscape of this much maligned decade to uncover hidden gems and to explode many of the well-established myths about 1970s British film and cinema...read more

Product Description: Amateur film: Meaning and Practice 1927–77 plunges readers into the world of home movie making and reveals that behind popular perceptions of clichéd family scenes shakily shot at home or by the sea, there is much more to discover...read more

Product Description: A refreshing insight into a previously neglected area of popular British cinema – the holiday film - including historical information about the British holiday and analyses of key films from the 1900s to the recent past.

Product Description: Humphrey Jennings ranks amongst the greatest film makers of twentieth century Britain. Although a relatively unknown figure to the wider public, his war-time documentaries are regarded by many (including Lord Puttnam, Lindsay Anderson and Mike Leigh) as amongst the finest films of their time...read more

Product Description: Cinema and radio in Britain and America, 192060 charts the evolving relationship between the two principal mass media of the period. It explores, for the first time in print, the creative symbiosis that developed between the two, including regular film versions of popular radio series as well as radio versions of hit films...read more

Product Description: Seventies British Cinema provides a comprehensive re-evaluation of British film in the 1970s. The decade has long been written off in critical discussions as a 'doldrums' period in British cinema, perhaps because the industry, facing near economic collapse, turned to 'unacceptable' low culture genres such as sexploitation comedies or extreme horror...read more

Product Description: This book is the first ever full-length study of the reception of British cinema in post-war France, challenging François Truffaut’s infamous dismissal of British cinema as ‘a contradiction in terms’, a comment which has been, and still is, widely reproduced, yet has until now remained critically unexplored...read more

In this definitive and long-awaited history of 1950s British cinema, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter draw extensively on previously unknown archive material to chart the growing rejection of post-war deference by both film-makers and cinema audiences. Competition from television and successive changes in government policy all forced the production industry to become more market-sensitive. The films produced by Rank and Ealing, many of which harked back to wartime structures of feeling, were challenged by those backed by Anglo-Amalgamated and Hammer. The latter knew how to address the rebellious feelings and growing sexual discontents of a new generation of consumers. Even the British Board of Film Censors had to adopt a more liberal attitude. The collapse of the studio system also meant that the screenwriters and the art directors had to cede creative control to a new generation of independent producers and film directors. Harper and Porter explore the effects of these social, cultural, industrial, and economic changes on 1950s British cinema.

Product Description: This work charts Britain's reaction to World War II by examining 13 key films produced between 1939 and 1945, including the work of Noel Coward, George Formby, Leslie Howard and Carol Reed. The book is illustrated with stills from each film, and considers script, reviews and box office returns to place each in its social and political context...read more

Product Description: The Second World War was such a cataclysmic event that its echoes still reverberate over fifty years after it ended. One of the prime means of exploring the impact of the war has been the feature film. From In Which We Serve, Millions Like Us and The Way to the Stars, made during the war, to Above Us the Waves and the Dam Busters made in the 1950s, the war film became a staple of British cinema - but popular success was not paralleled by critical approval...read more

Product Description: This is a major new study of British Cinemaís formative years. Between 1918-1928 British film was poised between a Victorian past and a future marked out as American. Examining a cinema inextricably intertwined with notions of theatricality, pictorialism and literariness, in which the high cultural, middlebrow and popular intersect, this book re-evaluates the little known but interesting and often startling films of the 1920s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Between 1918 and 1928 British film was poised between a Victorian past and a future marked out as American. Examining a cinema inextricably intertwined with notions of theatricality, pictorialism and literariness, in which the high cultural, middlebrow and popular intersect, this study re-evaluates the little-known by interesting and often startling films of the 1920s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This book offers a startling re-evaluation of what has until now been seen as the most critically lackluster period of the British cinema. Twenty writers contribute essays that rediscover and reassess the productions of the Festival of Britain decade, during which the vitality of wartime film-making flowed into new forms. Topics covered include genres such as the B-film, the war film, the woman's picture, the theatrical adaptation and comedy; also social issues such as censorship and the screen representation of childhood. (view table of contents)

In the fifties British cinema won large audiences with popular war films and comedies, creating stars such as Dirk Bogarde and Kay Kendall, and introducing the stereotypes of war hero, boffin and comic bureaucrat which still help to define images of British national identity. In British Cinema in the Fifties, Christine Geraghty examines some of the most popular films of this period, exploring the ways in which they approached contemporary social issues such as national identity, the end of empire, new gender roles and the care of children.Through a series of case studies on films as diverse as It Always Rains on Sunday and Genevieve, Simba and The Wrong Arm of the Law, Geraghty explores some of the key debates about British cinema and film theory, contesting current emphases on contradiction, subversion and excess and exploring the curious mix of rebellion and conformity which marked British cinema in the post-war era.

Product Description: This study analyzes British wartime cinema, offering extended examination of a wide selection of feature films and documentaries made in Britain between 1939 and 1946, and using textual analyses of these films to explore the historical,social, and cultural context of social class in Britain within the overall situation of ‘total war' and its concomitant propaganda imperative of ‘The People's War...read more