Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film

Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film

by Alan K. Rode
Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film

Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film

by Alan K. Rode

Paperback

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Overview

Academy Award–winning director Michael Curtiz (1886–1962)—whose best-known films include Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and White Christmas (1954)—was in many ways the anti-auteur. During his unprecedented twenty-seven year tenure at Warner Bros., he directed swashbuckling adventures, westerns, musicals, war epics, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, and film noir masterpieces. The director's staggering output of 180 films surpasses that of the legendary John Ford and exceeds the combined total of films directed by George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and Howard Hawks.

In the first biography of this colorful, instinctual artist, Alan K. Rode illuminates the life and work of one of the film industry's most complex figures. He explores the director's little-known early life and career in his native Hungary, revealing how Curtiz shaped the earliest days of silent cinema in Europe before immigrating to the United States in 1926. In Hollywood, Curtiz earned a reputation for explosive tantrums, his difficulty with English, and disregard for the well-being of others. However, few directors elicited more memorable portrayals from their casts, and ten different actors delivered Oscar-nominated performances under his direction.

In addition to his study of the director's remarkable legacy, Rode investigates Curtiz's dramatic personal life, discussing his enduring creative partnership with his wife, screenwriter Bess Meredyth, as well as his numerous affairs and children born of his extramarital relationships. This meticulously researched biography provides a nuanced understanding of one of the most talented filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813180434
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Publication date: 02/16/2021
Series: Screen Classics
Pages: 712
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Alan K. Rode is the author of Charles McGraw: Film Noir Tough Guy. A writer and film scholar, he is also the host and producer of the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival and director-treasurer of the Film Noir Foundation. He lives in Woodland Hills, California.

Table of Contents

Prologue ix

1 A River Runs through It 1

2 Actor to Director 8

3 Transylvanian Idyll 17

4 Phönix Rising 25

5 A Stirred-up Anthill 33

6 City of Film 39

7 Monumental-Filme 44

8 Exodus in Red Heels 54

9 A Family Business 64

10 Hungarian in the Promised Land 71

11 A Loving Collaboration 81

12 Hollywood's Great Deluge 90

13 General Foreman 103

14 Pre-Code in Synthetic Flesh 114

15 Regime Change 130

16 Home on the Range 146

17 The Dream Team 164

18 The Reason Why 184

19 Falling Fruit 201

20 Cash Cow 224

21 Reaching Their Majority 246

22 The Swash and the Buckler 269

23 The "Pinochle" of His Career 292

24 Fundamental Things 309

25 "Those fine patriotic citizens, the Warner Brothers" 338

26 Victory Garden 366

27 A Michael Curtiz Production 389

28 Vanished Dreams 412

29 Doomed Masterpiece 437

30 Nerve Ending 461

31 Only in Hollywood 482

32 Dégringolade 510

33 Out on His Shield 535

Afterword to the New Edition 549

Acknowledgments 557

Filmography 561

Notes 584

Bibliography 635

Index 647

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Alan K. Rode's intensely personal biography provides the reader with a complete, well-researched, comprehensive, and critical career study of a brilliant yet complicated artist. A wonderful read and an accurate source for future reference, Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film is thoroughly satisfying, highly intelligent, and a delicious, rich dessert for any serious lover of film and film history. Indulge." — Stephen Michael Shearer, author of Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life


"A superbly researched, highly compelling account of one of cinema's most gifted and underrated directors, Rode provides a vivid description of Curtiz's personality and working methods. It is difficult if not impossible to imagine a more complete account of his life." — Steven C. Smith, author of A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann


"Finally! In Alan K. Rode's deeply researched and compelling biography, Michael Curtiz gets long overdue recognition as one of the cinema's greatest storytellers.  Casablanca is merely the most renowned of the man's many masterpieces, and Rode does the director justice by leaving no stone unturned in his examination of Curtiz's life and career. This book is a significant addition, and at times a valuable corrective, to existing scholarship on Hollywood, the studio system, and the auteur theory.  Bravo!" — Eddie Muller, author and Turner Classic Movies host

Stephen Michael Shearer

"Alan K. Rode's intensely personal biography provides the reader with a complete, well-researched, comprehensive, and critical career study of a brilliant yet complicated artist. A wonderful read and an accurate source for future reference, Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film is thoroughly satisfying, highly intelligent, and a delicious, rich dessert for any serious lover of film and film history. Indulge."

Eddie Muller

"Finally! In Alan K. Rode's deeply researched and compelling biography, Michael Curtiz gets long overdue recognition as one of the cinema's greatest storytellers. Casablanca is merely the most renowned of the man's many masterpieces, and Rode does the director justice by leaving no stone unturned in his examination of Curtiz's life and career. This book is a significant addition, and at times a valuable corrective, to existing scholarship on Hollywood, the studio system, and the auteur theory. Bravo!"

Steven C. Smith

"A superbly researched, highly compelling account of one of cinema's most gifted and underrated directors, Rode provides a vivid description of Curtiz's personality and working methods. It is difficult if not impossible to imagine a more complete account of his life."

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