Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town
276 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
20 B-W images
Paperback
Release Date:13 May 2025
ISBN:9781978838376
Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town is the first book devoted to the career of one of the director/producers who in the early years of sound cinema was instrumental in establishing the Hollywood model of production that would endure for more than half a century. As a director and producer, LeRoy was responsible for turning out more than sixty feature films in a career that spanned five decades; as a studio executive, he contributed substantially to the success of the industry during the challenging period of the Depression and also in the period of realignment and readjustment that followed the end of World War II. This book offers chapters devoted to individual films such as Little Caesar, Waterloo Bridge, 30 Seconds over Tokyo, Gypsy, and Quo Vadis.
A studio director in the best and sometimes worst sense of the term, in this book Mervyn LeRoy finally gets his due—and then some: nineteen compact essays redress decades-old snubs, together rehabilitating the reputation of the director of such classics as Little Caesar and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town revisits old-school auteurism to help readers appreciate and understand the work of an unpretentious American artist.
By offering the first sustained look at the career of Mervyn LeRoy, this book does something new, showing what a director-driven study can be like without the neo-romanticism of traditional auteur theory.
MURRAY POMERANCE is an independent scholar living in Toronto and the author of numerous books, including Edge of the Screen and Uncanny Cinema: Agonies of the Viewing Experience, as well as the editor or coeditor of dozens of books, including Autism in Film and Television: On the Island.
R. BARTON PALMER is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature emeritus at Clemson University, where he founded the World Cinema program. Among numerous books and multiauthor volumes, he is the coauthor of Major Performers in Hollywood Noir and Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America, as well as the author of Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Space.
R. BARTON PALMER is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature emeritus at Clemson University, where he founded the World Cinema program. Among numerous books and multiauthor volumes, he is the coauthor of Major Performers in Hollywood Noir and Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America, as well as the author of Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Space.
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