Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-48 Robert Murphy 9780415076845

Looks at popular rather than art films - the films people wanted to see - contemporary cultural approach

Author has contributed to Screen, Sight and Sound, Time Out and several books on cinema history, and is currently researching 1960s for BFI book

Interest in British film industry renaissance

`Pursuing his theory in lively style and with examination of a large number of productions, the author has written an unfailingly interesting study, fully documented and concluding with a useful chronology of cinema society through the period.' - Film Review

`Robert Murphy ... has broken new ground, not only in covering the British cinema in the forties as a whole, but in looking beyond the critical orthodoxy ...' - Eric Braun, The Stage and Television Today

`...very well documented, gracefully written, and convincingly argued.' - Choice

`...[a] welcome addition to the impressive `Cinema and Society' series...' - History Today

Sight and Sound praised: `... the readiness, indeed eagerness, of Murphy's study to browse along not just the main thoroughfare of 1940s British Cinema ... but also an assortment of back streets: By-Ways for variety and radio stars.'

`Pursuing his theory in lively style and with examination of a large number of productions, the author has written an unfailingly interesting study, fully documented and concluding with a useful chronology of cinema society through the period.' - Film Review

`... elegant and clearly written ...' - Michael Paris, History Today

`Robert Murphy ... has broken new ground, not only in covering the British cinema in the forties as a whole, but in looking beyond the critical orthodoxy ...' - Eric Braun, The Stage and Television Today

`... solidly researched ... a detailed and straightforward account of the hundreds of British films turned out during the period ...' - J.K.L. Walker, Times Literary Supplement