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Royal octavo, white boards (hardcover), gilt letters, xix, 284 pp. Fine in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: In the earliest days of motion pictures, the Civil War was only some forty years in the past, distant enough to be history, yet close enough to stir nostalgia. In one of the first films about the war, All's Fair in Love and War, Confederate Army veteran John Singleton Mosby (although then past seventy) played himself. In The Blue and the Gray on the Silver Screen, film scholar Roy Kinnard presents a retrospective of nearly one hundred films which deal directly or peripherally with the Civil War period. Readers will relive such classics as The Red Badge of Courage and So Red the Rose as well as more recent films such as Sommersby and Gettysburg. Included are such comic films as Buster Keaton's classic The General and Red Skelton's A Southern Yakee. Each description includes a cast list, credits, and reviews. Complete with nearly 200 photographs illustrating the text, the book is in itself a record of the war as portrayed by Hollywood. Over the century the movies' "take" on the war veered between sympathy for "the cause" and castigation of the institution of slavery. In 1915, D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation revolutionized moviemaking though it was then (and is now) one of the most controversial films ever produced. Its villains were emancipated slaves (mostly white actors in blackface), and its heroes the Ku Klux Klan. The most successful, albeit romanticized view of the postbellum South remains Gone With the Wind, which, more than fifty years after its premiere in 1939, continues to be enormously popular with audiences everywhere. With attention to detail and its careful analysis of how each movie reflected the period in which it was made, The Blue and the Gray on the Silver Screen provides a social commentary as well as a useful resource that will delight Civil War buffs and film fans alike. Performing Arts, Moviemaking, Film, American Film, Americana, U.S.-iana, American Culture, Civil War, War between the States, History in Film, War in Film, Film Studies, U. S. History. bslic.
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