The Best Pictures 1939-1940, and the Year Book of Motion Pictures in America [*SIGNED*]

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1940. First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [a good sound copy, modest wear to extremities; the jacket is edgeworn, with bits of paper loss at both ends of the spine, miscellaneous creasing at the top and bottom edges of the front panel, tiny tears at all corners, and a 3/4" puncture wound at the rear hinge; NOTE that the dust jacket on this book has been supplied from another copy]. (B&W photographs) INSCRIBED and SIGNED on the front endpaper, to film director Vincent Sherman, by both editors: "To our good friend -- / a swell writer , a fine / director - Vince Sherman / Dick Macaulay / Jerry Wald / Nov. 8, 1940." This fat volume (534 pages) documents the 1939/1940 movie "season" -- defined as films released between July 1, 1939 and July 1, 1940 -- a concept that reveals what the publishers were trying to do, i.e. create an annual movie chronicle that followed the pattern of its long-running "Best Plays" series, but that didn't quite work for the film world, which didn't operate on a seasonal basis in the same way that the Broadway theatre did. It was a pretty good season, though: the ____ films chosen as the "Best" were: BACHELOR MOTHER; GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS; NINOTCHKA; REBECCA; MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON; DR. EHRLICH'S MAGIC BULLET; and DESTRY RIDES AGAIN. (One rather glaring omission, though, is the film that we still most likely associate the most with 1939: GONE WITH THE WIND. This is explained by the editors in their Introduction: "Because of the great length of the scenario and, consequently, the probable injustice of any condensation, we were unable to make with Margaret Mitchell and her publishers the arrangements that would permit us to condense the late Sidney Howard's screenplay for publication in this volume.") Note "condensation": it's to be noted that the scripts for the aforementioned seven films are not presented in standard screenplay format, but rather in a kind of hybrid dialogue-and-prose passage manner, with action (i.e. non-dialogue) portions having been reworked into a narrative that uses the present progressive tense that's so peculiar to screenwriting, e.g. "Maxim gets up and starts back to the bathroom, picking up his clothes from a nearby chair." The effect, for the reader, is like having someone narrate the action and dialogue of the movie as it unfolds on the screen (including, often, descriptions of individual shots and editing cuts, although generally speaking much of the technical jargon has been removed). Each selection is introduced with several pages of background information about the genesis and production of the film, and by way of illustration each film is allotted a single full-page scene still. These seven "scripts" take up a bit more than half the volume, and are followed by a 27-page discussion of "The Production Season" (no doubt well-informed by the fact that both editors were quite active in the industry, Wald as a writer-producer, Macaulay as a screenwriter); the remainder of the volume is devoted to an alphabetical rundown of the "major pictures" released during the season, with basic production and cast credits for each, and a brief reference section of major awards to date (Academy Awards, New York Film Critics' Circle Awards, and the Film Daily annual Ten Best lists). The concept was somewhat of a precursor to the "Screen World" series that would begin publication in the late 1940s (albeit less encyclopedic), but for whatever reason the publishers decided not to continue it as a series, so this became a one-off. (It might be noted that editors Wald and Macaulay and inscribee Vincent Sherman were all under contract to Warner Bros. at the time, and that Wald and Macaulay were frequent co-writers.) ****NOTE that additional postage charges will be assessed for international shipping of this moderately heavy book; if this concerns you, please contact us for a shipping quote before placing your order. As always at ReadInk, domestic Media Mail shipping is free.**** .