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.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1. Prologue
2. A River Runs through It
3. Actor to Director
4. Transylvanian Idyll
5. Phönix Rising
6. A Stirred-up Anthill
7. City of Film
8. Monumental-Filme
9. Exodus in Red Heels
10. A Family Business
11. Hungarian in the Promised Land
12. A Loving Collaboration
13. Hollywood’s Great Deluge
14. General Foreman
15. Pre-Code in Synthetic Flesh
16. Regime Change
17. Home on the Range
18. The Dream Team
19. The Reason Why
20. Falling Fruit
21. Cash Cow
22. Reaching Their Majority
23. The Swash and the Buckler
24. The ‚Pinochle‘ of His Career
25. Fundamental Things
26. ‚Those fine patriotic citizens, the Warner Brothers‘
27. Victory Garden
28. A Michael Curtiz Production
29. Vanished Dreams
30. Doomed Masterpiece
31. Nerve Ending
32. Only in Hollywood
33. Dégringolade
34. Out on His Shield
35. Afterword to the New Edition
36. Acknowledgements
37. Filmography
38. Notes
39. Bibliography
40. Index
Über den Autor
Alan K. Rode is the author of Charles Mc Graw: 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.
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