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John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh (eds.), American Classic Screen: Interviews, Profiles, Features, 3 vols. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2010. 321 pp. 307 pp, 338 pp. Paper.
The National Film Society of America came into being in 1976 as an offshoot of the Bijou Film Society, an organization bringing together lovers of classic Hollywood cinema from around the country. Their journal, American Classic Screen, began in the same year, and ran nine years until 1985. At its height it attracted a circulation of 2,500-plus. Each issue comprised a series of articles, features and profiles written by big names such as DeWitt Bodeen, and up-and-coming names such as Frank Thompson (later a successful screenwriter), James Welsh (founder of Literature/ Film Quarterly), and John Tibbetts, now a prolific writer and broadcaster on movies and music.
In the nine-year period covered by the journal, I received my own education in classical Hollywood cinema-not through formal means (my doctorate was in seventeenth century English drama), but through long-term exposure to matinees broadcast each afternoon on Britain's Channel Four. Many of the great stars of the classical period also appeared on Parkinson-the BBC's equivalent of The...