The ABCs of Classic Hollywood [Paperback]

Speaking about the kind of filmmaking now known as Classic Hollywood, the most popular and influential cinema ever invented, Vincente Minnelli once gave away its secret: I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.

What are those hidden things? Can we invent a method that will enable us to discover them?

Robert Ray attempts to answer those questions by looking closely at four movies from the 1930-1945 period when the American studio system reached the peak of its economic and cultural power:Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon,andMeet Me in St. Louis.To avoid the predictable generalizations that have plagued film studies, Ray works with the movies' details-Grand Hotel's room assignments orMeet Me in St. Louis's ketchup-which are treated as mysterious but promising clues. By producing at least one entry for every letter of the alphabet, Ray demonstrates that a movie's details have much to tell us.The ABCs of Classic Hollywoodis a movie primer, a deceptively simple book that spells out a fascinating account of the most powerful storytelling system ever designed.

One of the virtues of Robert B. Ray's marvelousThe ABC's of Classic Hollywoodis its grasp of the parts that hazard and happenstance play in even the most controlled filmmaking arena. There is almost as much jouissance to be had from this book as there is from the movies it discusses. -TimesLiterary Supplement

Film theory as pure, enlightened pleasure. Each entry is designed to explicate and yet, at the same time, propagate the mystique of cinema. -Sight & Sound

Robert B. Rayis the author ofA Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980,The Avant- Garde Finds Andy Hardyr, and How a Film Theory Got Lost and OtlÓÈ