Description:
Using newly unearthed primary sources, this ground-breaking book examines the bitter and little known struggle in Hollywood and Washington D.C. during 1933 to create a National Recovery Administration (NRA) code of practice for the motion picture industry.
Brief description: Harvey G. Cohen is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King's College London. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters and his monograph Duke Ellington's America (University of Chicago Press, 2010) was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post.
Review Quotes: Using an extensive variety of sources judiciously, Harvey G. Cohen is able to demonstrate, in a most persuasive manner, the complex ways in which these three film musicals of 1933 played out wider struggles in American society in the midst of the Great Depression. The author ably analyses how the complex interweaving between political, economic and aesthetic factors were so closely interlinked in these films, and the ramifications in the wider political arena. Notions of 'pure entertainment' are thus shown up to be much more complex than they might, at first sight, appear, and this book demonstrates in great detail how light-hearted musicals can have more depth than their glossy surface might initially suggest.--Allister Mactaggart, Chesterfield College "Cercles"