RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleMcBride takes us through Lubitsch’s working life—from Weimar Germany to Hollywood—and shows us how he matured with every step in his career: the slumming-around in bit Shakespearean roles in Max Reinhardt’s theater troupe, the lavish German spectacles, the zany comedies, the rejuvenation of Hollywood’s silent film industry ... McBride’s insights on each of these gems sparkle with a devoted fan’s carefully discerning eye. McBride encourages us to look at lesser-known yet incredible Lubitsch films ... Even when you don’t agree with McBride, he’s still interesting ... McBride does much-needed work in showing how Lubitsch was one of the consummate artists America was ever lucky enough to claim as her own.
David Thomson
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle...his book makes the convincing case for why, in his words, 'this subject is more important than respectability.' Some of the best popular artists (think Charlie Chaplin, Josef von Sternberg or Alfred Hitchcock) were notorious megalomaniacs, men of ill repute. Yet their art lasts. Thomson makes you see why Warners deserves to be at the top of the pile. Maybe it’s exactly because Thomson spends less time on the brothers’ biographical personalities that his book works as an investigation into the American cultural psyche ... Thomson is best in the early parts of the book, when he takes a look at how the Jewish and folk values the Warners stood for manifested themselves in their socially conscious films ... Thomson is best when he waxes lyrical on movies he unapologetically loves ... Thomson’s book testifies to that obsessive pursuit — like Ethan Edwards pursuing Debbie in The Searchers (1956), another Warners picture — of trying to pin down a beautiful past that one knows is gone. But never dead.
