Histoire du Cinéma Hollywood

La beauté d’Ava Gardner, sa sensualité à fleur de peau, sa vie privée tapageuse ont fait fantasmer la planète et continuent de faire rayonner la star en ce centenaire de sa naissance. “Sex-symbol”, “femme fatale”, ces formules ont occulté l’authenticité d’un esprit libre, sensible et anticonformiste, imposant sa place à égalité avec les hommes et refusant l’intolérance : la carrière d’Ava Gardner est ainsi un miroir sur les évolutions de la société.

Si Laurel et Hardy sont devenus le duo comique le plus célèbre du cinéma, leur vie privée, en revanche, demeure méconnue. Qui se cachait derrière le masque des deux compères ? La biographie complète et illustrée de deux vedettes dont le succès planétaire avait envahi la vie privée.

Released in 1942, the film won 4 Oscars, including Best Picture and featured unforgettable performances by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
The book offers a rich account of the film’s origins, the myths and realities behind its production, and the reasons it remains so revered today.

Through extensive research and interviews with film-makers, Noah Isenberg explores he ways in which the film continues to dazzle audiences and saturate popular culture 75 years after its release.

‘Fascinating . . . filled with lively historical digressions.’ New York Times ‘Best True Crime of 2022’

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England.

In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that the had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France – and disappeared without a trace. He was never seen or heard from again. No body was ever found.

Le Prince’s family were convinced Edison had stolen Louis’s work, and so they sued the most famous inventor in the world. By the time the lawsuit was over, Le Prince’s own son was dead under suspicious circumstances – and modern Hollywood was being born.

From her days as a youthful minx at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to her post-studio reign as America’s lustiest middle-aged movie queen, Taylor has defined the very essence of Hollywood stardom. Marching through the decades swathed in mink, discarding husbands nearly as frequently as she changed her diamond necklaces, Taylor dominated the headlines as no other star before or since. From America’s sweetheart to America’s homewrecker and then back again, she uncannily reflected (and at times predicted) the always shifting cultural zeitgeist. How to Be a Movie Star is a different kind of book about Elizabeth Taylor: an intimate look at a girl who grew up with fame, who learned early – and well – how to be famous.

From his early aspirations to sing opera, to his time under the tutelage of D. W. Griffith, to the fortune and notoriety that his uncanny eye for talent deservedly brought him, Mack Sennett stood behind his belief in individuality and originality. Now, more than eighty years after Sennett rose to heights that epitomized the American dream, the acclaimed biographer of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and W. C. Fields offers a compelling account of comedy's transformation at the hands of a true master.

John Ford’s many classic movies – among them Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – earned him worldwide praise and renown. Now Joseph McBride presents us with the definitive account of the man’s myriad complexities and contradictions, tracing Ford’s life from his modest beginnings as ‘Bull’ Feeney, the nearsighted football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Maine, to his recognition, after a long, controversial, and much-decorated career, as America’s national myth-maker. This deeply insightful and impeccably documented narrative is the epic tribute that Ford’s stature merits.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy both passed away in the 1950s, yet their films still have the power to reduce audiences old and new to helpless laughter. There has been no comprehensive account of their lives and work, until now. The roots of their comic greatness lay in 19th century variety theatre. Lancashire-born Stan Laurel was steeped in the traditions of the music hall, and found himself touring the USA in the 1910s as Charlie Chaplin’s understudy. American Oliver Hardy had established himself as a ‘fat funny man’ by the time he and Laurel were first paired in 1927.

This is a wonderful secret history of British movies that includes the scandals, the suicides, the immolations and the contract killings – the product of thousands of conversations with veteran film-makers. Here you’ll meet, among many others, the 20s film idols snorting cocaine from an illuminated glass dance floor on the bank of the Thames, the model who escaped Soho’s gangsters to become the queen of the nudie flicks and the genteel Scottish comedienne who, at the age of fifty-five, reinvented herself as a star of exploitation cinema, and fondly remembers ‘the one where I drilled in people’s heads and ate their brains’. Welcome to the lost worlds of British cinema.

A bona fide tough guy with soulful eyes and a laconic style, Robert Mitchum was one of Hollywood’s best-loved actors, star of such moody film noir favourites as Out of the Past, Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear, as well as enduring classics like Angel Face and Crossfire. But, as Lee Server now reveals, Mitchum was one of the few Hollywood icons whose real-life exploits were yet more compelling than his on-screen persona. A hobo in the Depression, he fell into movie acting after stints as a boxer, a beach bum and a songwriter. Despite early Hollywood successes, he was famously busted on a narcotics rap. But even prison couldn’t tame Mitchum’s taste for living on the wild side, and he remained an unrepentant misbehaver until the end of his days.