References
General:
George MacDonald Fraser. The Hollywood History of the World. Harvill Press: London, 1996.
Actually, I first encountered George MacDonald Fraser when I started reading his Flashman series as a teenager. I confess that much of my initial attraction was due to the paintings of well-endowed women on the covers, but the novels gave me a different view of the history that I was taught in school, and helped solidify my love of history. This book sparked my original decision to do this web site, although the format has changed greatly since then. As a Scot who served in WWII, he naturally looks back at the movies of his youth, aside from a few more recent movies such as Braveheart and Rob Roy that caught his interest, therefore the book focuses more on costume dramas and the British empire. As he himself admits, it is not a comprehensive examination of every movie with a historical subject, and his sympathetic view of British imperialism may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but then again, he lived through many of the events shown on the screen and saw the old Raj firsthand. Filled with beautiful film stills from the Kobal Collection, the book is as entertaining as the movies he reviews, and it should make you want revisit the classic movie section of your video store and explore movies that actually had casts of thousands.
Roquemore, Joseph. History Goes To The Movies. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
Joseph Roquemore’s book is a more recent addition to this field, and takes a much more user friendly approach than George MacDonald Fraser’s book, listing each separate review in the Contents. Roquemore writes well and supports his reviews with impressive research, so I find it difficult to put down whenever I make the mistake of picking it up to check something. With its emphasis on films about America, it is an excellent complement to Fraser’s Hollywood History of the World.
Carnes, Mark C., general editor. Past Imperfect: History According to the movies. An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996.
62 prominent historians, experts in their fields, review 78 movies, and it also contains interviews with filmmakers John Sayles and Oliver Stone.
Westerns:
Horwitz, James. They Went Thataway. Thomas Congdon Books, New York, 1976.
Covers western stars from the first Broncho Billy, through Tom Mix, the big four who tried to replace him, Hopalong Cassidy, the singing cowboys (Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and “Tex” Ritter), the heroes of the fifties, Audie Murphy, Joel McCrea, and Randolph Scott, as well as narrates the ups and downs of westerns in Hollywood. Those 100 pages are a fun, fast-paced, and accurate look at the men who starred in the westerns, but the rest of the book is devoted to Horwitz’s love of westerns, his tour of cowboy towns, and his efforts to meet his old heroes, who have either died or been forgotten. I could have done without the tour of the cowboy towns, but the interviews are quite touching.
Newman, Kim. Wild West Movies: How the West Was Found, Won, Lost, Lied About, Filmed and Forgotten. London: Bloomsbury, 1990.
This book offers his same encyclopedic knowledge of Westerns that makes me enjoy his fiction, especially his Dracula series. However, I have to admit that his inclusion of all movies from the American Revolution onward is a little silly.
Civil War:
Chadwick, Bruce. The Reel Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
Chadwick is fond of dropping quotes from historians and writers, really a lot of quotes, but he makes good use of historiography. Some of the films he talks about and praises no longer exist, therefore I presume he has never seen them, which comes across as more than a little strange. Reminds me of how ancient history relies on sources that talk about earlier sources to piece together different fragments. The book is divided into neat sections, women, blacks, etc. Birth of a Nation is important even though few outside of film students have seen it, but it does not need 3 chapters, a fifth of the book. Young Mr. Lincoln got a few pages. Friendly Persuasion had to settle for a paragraph, while Sgt. Rutledge received 2 lines. At least Glory got 7 pages, although Ride With the Devil apparently only deserved a handful of lines. However, I like the way he works hard to show how the atmosphere in the South at the time of each new wave of Civil War movies influenced the direction of each movie. His chapters on Gone With The Wind (GWTW) are very detailed, presumably because he wants to drive home how distorted Mitchell’s view of the South was. Among the 14 chapters, 3 are for Birth and 2 for GWTW, and 1 for Roots, I realize that they were very influential, but everything else seems rushed. I get the impression that he spent so much time on those two movies because they have been argued over so much, and it needs to be settled.
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. 3rd edition, New York, The Continuum Publishing Company, 1994.
A chronologically organized look at blacks in movies since the silent era that reviews hundreds of movies with black actors, and contains essays on black stars and directors, as well as essays on various eras. Pretty much the best book on Black cinema , providing both excellent film reviews and perceptive social commentary, its only limitation is a desire to fit all black characters into one of the five stock characters mentioned in the title. Changes the way that you look at films, and changes the way people look at you when reading it on the bus.
Riskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs and Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
It’s a brilliant examination of that paradoxical decade where counterculture rebels successfully stormed Hollywood, only to become as greedy as the studio overlords they had overthrown, while installing new cultural icons at the same time. A no-holds barred book, but it ignores older directors like Peckinpah. After reading this, all of the great directors of this “New Hollywood” come across as annoying little teenagers. What’s especially amusing is that many of his comments like Hopper shooting guns in a drunken rage or Towne using copious amounts of coke will be followed by statements such as (Hopper denies shooting a gun at this time), I wonder how many times he has been sued.
