Description
The Many Lives of Cy Endfield is the first book on this fascinating figure. The fruit of years of archival research and personal interviews by Brian Neve, it documents Endfield's many identities: among them second-generation immigrant, Jew, Communist, and exile. Neve paints detailed scenes not only of the political and personal dramas of the blacklist era, but also of the attempts by Hollywood directors in the postwar 1940s and early 1950s to address social and political controversies of the day. Out of these efforts came two crime melodramas (what would become known as film noir) on inequalities of class and race: The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury (also known as Try and Get Me!). Neve reveals the complex production and reception histories of Endfield's films, which the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum saw as reflective of "an uncommon intelligence so radically critical of the world we live in that it's dangerous."
The Many Lives of Cy Endfield is at once a revealing biography of an independent, protean figure, an insight into film industry struggles, and a sensitive and informed study of an underappreciated body of work.
About the Author
Brian Neve is an honorary reader in politics and film at the University of Bath, USA. He is the author of Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition and Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider and coeditor of "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era.
Book Information
ISBN 9780299303747
Author Brian Neve
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint University of Wisconsin Press
Publisher University of Wisconsin Press
Weight(grams) 403g