Do you like old movies? Do you wonder how the whole movie industry got started? Want to see a picture of a naked (young) Peter Fonda?

Now that I got your attention, let's go to the matter of this wonderful book. It's a large "coffee table" type of book, all the pictures are in balck and white - even the wonderful close-up of Liz Taylor in "Reflections in a Golden Eye" and it is quite marvelous to look through.

The book starts off the invention of the "moving pictures" by Edison with the help of his assistant Dickson. It moves from Penny Arcades or Peep Shows (didn't the meaning of that phrase change over the years?) on to kinetoscopeand George Melies. There are scenes from everything from "The Great Train Robbery" as well as "Midnight Cowboy" with many stops inbetween.

There are stills from films of the Nickelodeon age - "Gertie the Dinosaur". one of the first animated films, as well as "The Fighting Roosevelts". There are the reports of the public reaction to "Birth of a Nation" and Griffith's answer to such reports. I was amazed to learn that Harold LLoyd's "human fly" stunt (in "Safety Last", a great film if you can find it) was done with no trick photography, no stunt doubles and onaly a net netween the star of the movie and the street below. That makes that scene seem totally different when you know there wasn't much room to make a mistake.

Of course, the book has many stills of the movies of the Marx Brothers, postwar musicals as well as features on such stars as Eliazabeth Taylor, Sidney Portier and Marilyn Monroe. Various movie styles are featured with stills of the more famous (and not so famous) actors of that type. It is basically a visual encyclopedia of film history.

If you like older movies and want the information on how various effects were accomplished or you want to see pictures of Joan Crawford from various stages of her career, this is the book for you. You can use it as a reference or just look through it on those days and nights when there seems to be nothing good on tv or at the movies. Find it and enjoy it.

I came to this book having finished Musser's "The Formation of Cinema," the first volume in this series. Sad to say, this volume is a disappointment.

Yes, there is some good information here, but the author's style is extremely dry, and I found her footnoting style to be very misleading. (She mentioned one film that exists only in fragments in a Soviet film archive in Moscow, and her footnote lists only the original review of the movie in 1914, before there even was a Soviet film archive.) She pursues the topic of the origin of the closeup to death, devoting one whole chapter to whether the camera was 12 feet from the actors or only 9 feet.

Admittedly, the era of the "Patent wars" is confusing, but I think more could have been done to make this era clearer to readers. This is a very weak volume in an extremely good series of books on the American cinema.

Ms. Bowser has written a detailed history of this film period, using her extensive research from early film trade magazines and the court records for the Patent War trial proceedings. The Patent litigation can be very confusing, but she does a good job of pointing out the important highlights. Besides the Patent War, the Patents Company also lost the economic war with the independent film producers and distributors. She describes the rise of the nickelodeon theatres, and the backlash against films by some moral "authorities" of the time. She shows many examples of films where the camera creeped closer to the actors than just a full shot of their body, and the early attempts to tell a story better by editing different shots together. This period was the very beginning of the "star" system. Many studios resisted releasing the names of their actors, but others (including a few licensed producers) were happy to do so. With the coming of feature films came bigger, more elaborate movie palaces. And although Hollywood started booming in this period, films were being made in New York City, New Jersey, Florida, San Antonio, Chicago, Ireland, Cuba, and many other places.

Because this book convers only American films, the reader will miss out on film history being made in Europe and the rest of the world. However, it does explain how Italian spectacles in 1913-1914 influenced certain American filmmakers. And Pathe Freres in France had some influence over distribution patterns in the USA before World War I. The main reason that I didn't give this book 5 stars is that it only describes major films as to their editing techniques or social content. There is no analysis as a whole of major films like THE ITALIAN, MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY and others. Also, short comedies like the Mack Sennett Keystones only have a couple of pages, and Charlie Chaplin (who started working in 1914) and Sidney Drew barely have a mention.

the University of California seriers on American Cinema is truely a wonderful collection on the movies. "Transformation..." gives a pretty detailed account of the changes in exhibition and production as well as the presentation of films to the public during the nickelodean phase. It debunks some myths concerning this period concerning Hollywood versus New York and New Jersey, the invention of the star system, the role of the director in production, etc. It also give a lot of detail on the changes in distribution during this period. A bargain for any film buff.