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Rating: 
Summary: Great volume among all 10 of the Series now published.
Review: Balio et al. assemble a fine addition to the Ten Volume Series of the History of American Cinema, conceived and edited by Charles Harpole, foremost film scholar and documentarian. No library, large or small, should be without all ten volumes in the Series because this is the definitive work on the subject.
The Series is published by Scribner-Thomson-Gale company and by the University of California Press. You may have to order direct because these are not discounted trade books.
Rating:
Summary: Great volume among all 10 of the Series now published.
Review: I had high hopes for this book. The volumes in this series on the origins of cinema, the Twenties and the Forties are very good. This book, however, proved a chore to get through.The big problem for me was that Balio seemed more interested in the movie companies as organizations and less interested in the films themselves. Compounding this was the fact that he sees the Thirties as a unit, and believes that the division of the decade's films into pre-Code and post-Code, with 1934 as the turning point, is a myth. Thus, to him, the "fallen women" films, Mae West comedies, classic gangster films, and horror films all died out because the public was tired, not because of censorship problems. Balio sees filmmaking in the Thirties as dominated by the studios and with directors being hired guns. Hence there is no real discussion of any directors. Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra and Josef von Sternberg are barely mentioned, except when Balio complains that their films didn't make enough money. Indeed, he seems to have no view of his own about the films. Instead, he views FILM DAILY and VARIETY as the voice of God. If they put the film on their 10 best list, it is good, and if they didn't, it isn't worth talking about. The idea that some films popular in the Thirties are no longer highly regarded or that some films despised at the time have become viewed as classics seems not to interest him at all. If someone who had no idea about the history of American film read this book, he would come away thinking that the "Golden Age of Hollywood" was a myth and these films were artifacts not worth seeing.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprisingly Dull
Review: I had high hopes for this book. The volumes in this series on the origins of cinema, the Twenties and the Forties are very good. This book, however, proved a chore to get through. The big problem for me was that Balio seemed more interested in the movie companies as organizations and less interested in the films themselves. Compounding this was the fact that he sees the Thirties as a unit, and believes that the division of the decade's films into pre-Code and post-Code, with 1934 as the turning point, is a myth. Thus, to him, the "fallen women" films, Mae West comedies, classic gangster films, and horror films all died out because the public was tired, not because of censorship problems. Balio sees filmmaking in the Thirties as dominated by the studios and with directors being hired guns. Hence there is no real discussion of any directors. Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra and Josef von Sternberg are barely mentioned, except when Balio complains that their films didn't make enough money. Indeed, he seems to have no view of his own about the films. Instead, he views FILM DAILY and VARIETY as the voice of God. If they put the film on their 10 best list, it is good, and if they didn't, it isn't worth talking about. The idea that some films popular in the Thirties are no longer highly regarded or that some films despised at the time have become viewed as classics seems not to interest him at all. If someone who had no idea about the history of American film read this book, he would come away thinking that the "Golden Age of Hollywood" was a myth and these films were artifacts not worth seeing.
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