Among Golden Age Hollywood film stars of European heritage known for playing characters from the East--Chinese, Southeast Asians, Indians and Middle Easterners--Anglo-Indian actor Boris Karloff had deep roots there. Based on extensive new research, this biography and career study of Karloff's "eastern" films provides a critical examination of 41 features, including many overlooked early roles, and offers fresh perspective on a cinematic luminary so often labeled a "horror icon." Films include The Lightning Raider (1919), 14 silent films from the 1920s, The Unholy Night (1929), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), The Mummy (1932), John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934), the Mr. Wong series (1938-1940), Targets (1968), and Isle of the Snake People (1971), one of six titles released posthumously.

As three of the most prominent actors of the early studio system, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart played an unparalleled role in the rise of the Warner Brothers Studio. These "Warners Wiseguys" are now virtually synonymous with the studio's era of gritty gangster films. This study of their interwoven studio-contract careers highlights the similarities of their personalities and their struggles with harsh typecasting. It details and comments critically on each of their combined 112 Warners films. Complete with commentary from the author and other film buffs. An appendix provides a filmographic guide to the films discussed, including lists of primary actors, release dates, directorial credits, and running times for each film.

The Making and Influence of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang uses a complete biography of Robert E. Burns, a World War I veteran who was coerced into taking part in a petty crime in Atlanta, Georgia. Sentenced to a harsh sentence on a barbaric chain gang, he twice escaped and remained on the run for decades, aided only by his minister-poet brother, Vincent G. Burns. Their collaborative book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! led to Darryl F. Zanuck and Mervyn Leroy's hard-hitting film adaptation released by Warner Bros. in 1932. The book simultaneously traces the making and influence of the film and the Burns brothers' continuing efforts to obtain a pardon, which never came. A truly unique volume, it exposes a shameful miscarriage of justice, while also covering the powerful Warner Bros. film, starring Paul Muni as Robert Burns, supported by Glenda Farrell, Allen Jenkins, Preston Foster, and many other members of the Warners' ""stock company,"" and its imitators that followed over the coming decades.

Robert Louis Stevenson's cinematic legacy is studied in-depth here, with a look at his life and his body of work. From The Sire De Maletroit's Door (1877) to St. Ives (1896), each adapted story and all relevant film versions are examined, including exhaustive analyses of the 1931 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the 1945 version of The Body Snatcher. A discussion of the process of adapting literature for the movies, demonstrating how Stevenson's stories have been misrepresented for more than 80 years, is also provided.

Originally formed by singer-songwriter Ian Anderson in psychedelic 1968, the band Hethro Tull has been recording its own kind of rock and roll and touring the globe for more than three decades. This is a history of the band through the present, written by a personal acquaintance of several of its members. The book includes a chronology of all of the band's recordings and information on all accompanying tours, with the author's critiques as well as the band's own reminiscences and opinions of each album. Also included are previously unpublished interviews with founder Ian Anderson long-time band member David Pegg, Mick Abrahams, Jeffrey Hammond, and Doane Perry, and other band members.

The Boys provides new ways to view and evaluate the work of this famous comedy team. The initial chapter summarizes the critical reception of the two and compares Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to other contemporary comedians. Brief biographies analyze their early solo films and the development of the team. Special attention is given to the team's cinematic and comic style, use of camera techniques, early sound practice, and gag development. The comics' complex relationship is detailed and analyzed. A complete filmography, including a rating and an indication of contents, covers each film. The team's final film, Atoll K (1951), is discussed in depth. Throughout the text quotes from such persons as Laurel and Hardy themselves, Buster Keaton, George Stevens, Dick Van Dyke, and Woody Allen enlighten and entertain. Great stills and posters.

The prodigious but humble scion of a New York theatrical family, Chester Morris acted on Broadway as a teenager and earned an Academy Award nomination for his first role in a Hollywood "talkie," Alibi (1929). He became leading man to filmdom's top female stars and starred in the popular series of "Boston Blackie" mysteries before creating substantial characters in the theater and the burgeoning medium of television. This first book about Morris provides a detailed, account of his life and career on stage, film, radio, and television, and as a celebrated magician. It also constructs a fascinating record of his previously undocumented labor activism during the early years of the Screen Actors Guild and his tireless efforts to aid U.S. troops on the home front during World War II.

Considered one of the finest performers in world cinema, Japanese actor Takashi Shimura (1905-1982) appeared in more than 300 stage, film and television roles during his five-decade career. He is best known for his frequent collaborations with Akira Kurosawa, including major roles in the landmark classics Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954), and for his memorable characterizations in Ishiro Honda's Godzilla (1954) and several Kaiju sequels. This is the first complete English-language account of Shimura's work. In addition to historical and critical coverage of Shimura's life and career, it includes an extensive filmography.

As two of the most popular entertainers of the mid-century film industry, comic greats Bud Abbott and Lou Costello offered an essential balm to the American public following the sorrows of the Great Depression and during the trauma of World War II. This is the first book to focus in detail on the immensely popular wartime films of Abbott and Costello, discussing the production, content, and reception of 18 films within the context of wartime events on the home front and abroad. The films covered include the service comedies Buck Privates, In the Navy, and Keep 'Em Flying; more mainstream comic relief films such as Pardon My Sarong and Who Done It?; and post-war experiments such as Little Giant and The Time of Their Lives. More than 120 stills and lobby cards from the author's personal collection illustrate the text, including many showing outtakes or deleted scenes.

These were unique, complex, personal and professional relationships between master director John Ford and his two favorite actors, John Wayne and Ward Bond. The book provides a biography of each and a detailed exploration of Ford's work as it was intertwined with the lives and work of both Wayne and Bond (whose biography here is the first ever published). The book reveals fascinating accounts of ingenuity, creativity, toil, perseverance, bravery, debauchery, futility, abuse, masochism, mayhem, violence, warfare, open- and closed-mindedness, control and chaos, brilliance and stupidity, rationality and insanity, friendship and a testing of its limits, love and hate--all committed by a ""half-genius, half-Irish"" cinematic visionary and his two surrogate sons: Three Bad Men.

This is the first book-length study of the 12 films starring African American Renaissance man Paul Robeson (1898-1976). Singer, actor, author, lawyer, athlete, pacifist and civil rights activist, Robeson was also the first African American to receive top billing in motion pictures, delivering unforgettable characterizations in such classics as The Emperor Jones (1933), Sanders of the River (1935), Show Boat (1936) and The Proud Valley (1940). Original research is provided from primary materials housed at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in Harlem and from Robeson's family and friends, including his son Paul Robeson Jr. and his godson, singer-composer Eric Bibb. Two appendices cover Robeson's film work as offscreen narrator and singer and his many stage appearances.

From Errol Flynn to Kevin Costner to Daffy Duck, the bandit of Sherwood Forest has gone through a variety of incarnations on the way to becoming a cinematic staple. The historic Robin Hood - actually an amalgam of several outlaws of medieval England - was continually transformed by oral tradition to become the romantic and deadly archer-swordsman who ""robbed from the rich to give to the poor."" This image was reinforced by popular literature, song and, in the 20th century, cinema.This volume provides in-depth information on each film based on the immortal hero. In addition, other historical figures such as Scottish rebel-outlaws Rob Roy MacGregor and William Wallace are examined. Nollen also explores nontraditional representations of the legend, such as Frank Sinatra's Robin and the Seven Hoods and Westerns featuring the Robin Hood motif. A filmography is provided, including production information, and the text is highlighted by rare photographs, advertisements, and illustrations.