50 Years of American Comedy
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Great Movie Comedians, The
From Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen
| Author: | Leonard Maltin |
|---|---|
| Hardback: | 238 pages |
| Publisher: | Crown Publishers (1978) |
| Avg. Rating: |   [8.00/10] |
| In Print? | No |
From the dust jacket...
Since the birth of motion pictures, audiences around the world have looked to the great movie comedians for the welcome laughter and the comic view of life their films provide. Today a new generation is discovering the same films that made people laugh forty, fifty, even sixty years ago, learning that great comedy is timeless.
Now film historian Leonard Maltin, whose earlier subjects have ranged from Walt Disney to Our Gang, provides fascinating new insights to the great movie comedians... what made each unique, how their careers developed, which films stand out among their work and why. His cogent essays are spiced with memorable incidents from the films and fresh anecdotes and observations on their creation. Each critique is accompanied by an exhaustive filmography and a gallery of rare photographs, many of which have never appeared in print before. TFrom the sound era Maltin takes a look at such luminaries as W. C. Fields, Mae West, The Marx Brothers, Joe E. Brown, Danny Kaye, the new "talking" comics such as Bob Hope and Red Skelton, as well as the combined slapstick and verbal mayhem of comedy teams like The Three Stooges and Abbott & Costello. Here too are the great movie comedians of our own time: Jerry Lewis, who almost single-handedly carried the banner of film comedy through the 1960s, when television drained the screen of comic talent; and Woody Allen, the movies' latest comedy superstar who, in the tradition of the earlier comedians, writes and directs as well as stars in his own films. Perhaps more than anything else, The Great Movie Comedians points up the continuity in screen comedy, the progression that has nurtured new ideas and welcomed individual talents, while building upon the foundation of the past. This fresh, thoughtful and appreciative look at the great funny men of the last half century will be of immense interest to all film buffs.
Reissued 2015 by Amazon/CreateSpace/Digital as print-on-demand Softbound and Kindle editions, with some expanded information.
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