Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town

Edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer

Rutgers University Press

Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town is the first book devoted to the career of one of the director/producers who in the early years of sound cinema was instrumental in establishing the Hollywood model of production that would endure for more than a half century. As a director and producer, LeRoy was responsible for turning out more than sixty feature films in a career that spanned five decades; as a studio executive, he contributed substantially to the success of the industry during the challenging period of the Depression and also in the period of realignment and readjustment that followed the end of WWII. This book offers chapters devoted to individual films such as Little Caesar, Waterloo Bridge, 30 Seconds over Tokyo, Gypsy, and Quo Vadis.

A studio director in the best and sometimes worst sense of the term, in this book Mervyn LeRoy finally gets his due—and then some: nineteen compact essays redress decades-old snubs, together rehabilitating the reputation of the director of such classics as Little Caesar and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town revisits old-school auteurism to help readers appreciate and understand the work of an unpretentious American artist. Jon Lewis, author of Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture

By offering the first sustained look at the career of Mervyn LeRoy, this book does something new, showing what a director-driven study can be like without the neo-romanticism of traditional auteur theory. Patrick Keating, author of Film Noir and the Arts of Lighting

MURRAY POMERANCE is an independent scholar living in Toronto and the author of numerous books, including Edge of the Screen and Uncanny Cinema: Agonies of the Viewing Experience, as well as the editor or coeditor of dozens of books, including Autism in Film and Television: On the Island.

R. BARTON PALMER is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature emeritus at Clemson University, where he founded the World Cinema program. Among numerous books and multi-author volumes, he is the coauthor of Major Performers in Hollywood Noir and Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar Hollywood, as well as the author of Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Space.

Introduction by R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance
Chapter 1. Little Caesar, Original Gangster by Matthew Solomon
Chapter 2. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang by David Desser
Chapter 3. The Forgotten Number: Sexual Economics, Politics, and PTSD in Gold Diggers of 1933 by Linda Badley
Chapter 4. Tugboat Annie: Cogs in the Wheel of Industry by Kristen Hatch
Chapter 5. What Makes Anthony Adverse? by Neil Badmington
Chapter 6. They Won’t Forget: Mervyn LeRoy Goes Deep South Matthew H. Bernstein
Chapter 7. Dance by Candlelight: Extinguishing the Everyday in Waterloo Bridge by Steven Rybin
Chapter 8. The Cells of Johnny Eager by Mark Osteen
Chapter 9. Random Harvest: “You haven’t even a memory” by Lawrence Napper
Chapter 10. His Finger on the Public Pulse: Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo by R. Barton Palmer
Chapter 11. On the Street Where You Live: Mervyn LeRoy’s East Side, West Side by Adrian Danks
Chapter 12. Trendsetting Quo Vadis by R. Barton Palmer
Chapter 13. Mervyn LeRoy’s Feminist Tale of a Million Dollar Mermaid by Rebecca Bell-Metereau
Chapter 14. The Palm at the End of the War: Mr. Roberts by Brenda Austin-Smith
Chapter 15. In Fertile Soil: The Bad Seed by Dominic Lennard
Chapter 16. Playing the Agent in The FBI Story by Daniel Varndell
Chapter 17. A Friend Out of an Enemy: Screen Space and the Traversal of Socio-cultural Boundaries in A Majority of One by Matthew Cipa
Chapter 18. “Nothing to hit but the heights”: Mervyn LeRoy’s Gypsy by Murray Pomerance
Chapter 19. Minute to Minute, Moment to Moment by Tom Conley
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

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