Air
Force
Edited with an Introduction by Lawrence Suid
Tino Balio, Series Editor
Wisconsin/Warner Bros. screenplay
series
Released in 1943, Air Force was immediately hailed as
the definitive "patriotic heart-throb in celluloid"
that America, engulfed in war and passionately bent on victory,
was primed to embrace. Lawrence Suid charts the evolution of
this cinematic success in his introduction to the screenplay,
tracing the tangled network of artistic, military, and nationalist
interests that molded this film and made it, even after the martial
fervor had settled, a standard against which all future films
about war would be measured.
Throughout the filming, there was tension
between the aims of the War Department and those of Howard Hawks.
Hawks would ultimately produce more than stitled propaganda:
it is the skillfully modulated tension, the ambience of men in
war, and the total immersion in action and adventure that make
this a Hollywood classic still savored and studied today.
Wisconsin/Warner Bros. screenplay
series
Tino Balio, series editor
Lawrence Suid is a historian and freelance writer. His publications include Guts and Glory (1978), a study of the military's influence
on the American film industry. Tino Balio, Professor in
the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison,
is the author of United
Artists: The Company Built by the Stars, United Artists: The Company
That Changed the Film Industry, and the editor of The American Film Industryas well as
the 22 volume Wisconsin/Warner
Bros. Screenplay series, all published by the University
of Wisconsin Press. He directed the Wisconsin Center for Film
and Theatre Research from 1966 to 1882.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.) |
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December 2005
LC: 81-070290 PN
224 pp. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 24 illus.
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