The Casablanca Man - The Cinema of Michael Curtiz (Paperback, New Ed)

Michael Curtiz (1888-1962) is considered to be one of the most important directors in film history. "The Casablanca Man" surveys Curtiz's mastery over a variety of genres which included biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musical, swashbuckler and western, and looks at his relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls on the basis of documentary evidence gleaned from archive research at Warner Brothers, rather than the hearsay on which so much of his reputation rests. This access to the production and financial details of Curtiz's Warner Brothers films from 1926 to 1953 is the most distinctive feature of Jim Robertson's work, most of it never having been made available to the general public. Concentrating on Curtiz's best-known films - "Casablanca", "Angels with Dirty Faces", "Mildred Pearce" and "King Creole" among them - Robertson explores his practical struggles over, for example, screenplays, his use of reality footage in his feature films, and the instinctive visual sense which governed his work.