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Charting the Difference
It is an informative resource for film students and scholars and a thoroughly engaging read for film buffs."--BOOK JACKET....
From Marx to McCarthy
This first full-length biography of a legendary and award-winning Hollywood writer, producer, and director (Duck Soup, My Favorite Wife, An Affair to ...
Never Give a Saga an Even Break
Parody is the least appreciated of all film comedy genres and receives little serious attention, even among film fans. This study elevates parody to m...
An Evolving Lens in Three Dark Comedies, 1918-1947
The book examines Charlie Chaplin's evolving perspective on dark comedy in his three war films, Shoulder Arms (1918), The Great Dictator (1940), and M...
The Great Escape
The poster-child victim of a dysfunctional family from Beech Grove, Indiana, Steve McQueen channeled his difficult childhood into a masterful career o...
Beyond Satire
From Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Gehring presents a compelling theory of the black comedy film genre. Placing...
Shadowlands
Born in Winchester, Indiana, Robert Wise spent much of his youth sitting in darkened movie theaters enthralled by the swashbuckling heroics of screen ...
Twelve Defining Comic Performances
The 1930s are routinely considered sound film's greatest comedy era. Though this golden age encompassed various genres of laughter, clown comedy is th...
First Lady of Hollywood
This is the first full-length biography of Irene Dunne, one of the most versatile actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. A recipient of the Kennedy Cent...
A Bio-Bibliography
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This bio-bibliography was designed to present a combined biographical, critical, and bibliographical portrait of the Marx Brothers. It examines their ...
This book presents a combined biographical, critical, and bibliographical estimate of Laurel and Hardy's significance in film comedy, the arts in gene...
Selected Players
The success of clown comedy is dependent on the comic or comics who take center stage. These comics are usually identified with a specific comedic sht...
Six Core Genres and Their Literary Roots
This groundbreaking film study begins with a survey of American print humorists from eras leading up to and overlapping the advent of film--including ...
Defining a New Era of Big Screen Comedy
The 1950s were a transitional period for film comedians. The artistic suppression of the McCarthy era and the advent of television often resulted in a...
Modes of Comedy in Twelve Defining Films
Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery has been described as "a kind of Rear Window for retirees." As this quote suggests, an analysis of Alfred Hitch...
In the style of Stuart Kaminsky, Wes D. Gehring of Ball State University has written an intriguing murder mystery involving a lost Chaplin film and a ...
A Genre of Madcap Romance
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A Biography
Back in the golden age of humor books (late 1920s-early 1950s), when wits of the pantheon like Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and S.J. Perelman were ...
Baseball Films in the Capra Tradition
Celebrated film director Frank Capra was a central architect of the "feel good" movie genre now known as populism, which celebrates people, families, ...
Twelve American Films
This examination of dark comedies of the 1970s focuses on films which concealed black humor behind a misleading genre label. All That Jazz (1979) is a...
What the Responses of 1920s Critics Reveal
Buster Keaton "can impress a weary world with the vitally important fact that life, after all, is a foolishly inconsequential affair," wrote critic Ro...
Film Comedian and Baseball Buffoon
As a young boy in the depths of the 1890s depression, Joe E. Brown had a job: making faces at the firemen on passing coal-burning trains so they would...
For Millions of Movie Fans During the 1930s, an actress from Fort Wayne, Indiana, personified the madcap adventures of their favorite form of screen c...
Huckster Comedians
The Decade's Great Comedians at Work in the Shadow of War
The twelve classic comedy films examined within these pages are distinguished by an equal number of defining comic performances. Ranging from The Grea...
All students of the Great Man's'career will have to rely on this work. . . . Perhaps Gehring's greatest contributio here is his discussion of 23 sketc...
Traditionally identified with screwball comedies, Frank Capra has seldom been considered a conduit for populist concerns and issues. In this book, Geh...
A Critical Biography of Robert Benchley
With the cooperation of Benchley family members, and using diaries and correspondence and much archival material, Gehring has written a fresh and live...
More Selected Essays
More essays from Ball State University's Distinguished Professor of Film....
A Subliminal Existentialist
"Filmmaker Sydney Pollack found his greatest success as the director of such celebrated pictures as They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The Way We Were , T...
Rebel with a Cause
On September 30, 1955, a budding movie star who had just completed a rigorous schedule that included three films, set out on a trip to participate in ...
Exit Laughing... Or, a Man, His Movies, and Sometimes His Monkeys
"I find myself always being drawn into Wes' comedic research and storytelling by its insights into the history, politics and sociology of the period e...
The Skeleton in Hollyswood's Closet; An Analytical Biography