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Harry Warren and the Hollywood Musical
Looks at the life, career, and times of the prolific, Academy Award-winning Hollywood songwriter, documenting and illustrating the films on which he worked, from 1933's 42nd Street to 1961's Ladies' Man
344 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1975
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July 5, 2021
I've had this book on my [real, physical] bookshelf [at home] for about 30 years now. Finally getting round to it. It's one of the few that I actually bought new before Citadel Press went out of business, and it came shrink-wrapped. If I'd got a good look at the contents I might not have been so keen to pay £20 for it.
This is basically charting the career of the great movie composer Harry Warren, who worked with lyricist Al Dubin to create all those great songs you'll remember from the Busby Berkeley musicals of the mid-1930s - "42nd Street", "We're In The Money", "I Only Have Eyes For You" and so on. It's quite a big book, bigger than standard for Citadel (I only have two other books from them that are this big - "They Had Faces Then" and "Those Glorious Glamour Years").
This book departs somewhat from the usual winning formula in that it devotes an awful lot of pages to actual sheet music, which isn't really much use to us people who don't play the piano and just wanted a good read. I wouldn't like to have to count how many complete pages of sheet music are included, but I'm estimating it as 50, and quite a lot of the other pages have a substantial amount of music score on them too. If the author thought it was really important to include all that musical notation, and I can't really say I agree on that, it would have been better to my mind if it had been included in a separate free supplement.
Besides all the sheet music I could have done without, sadly the pictures aren't all that good in this book either.
Tony Thomas is a familiar and well-respected name amongst Citadel Press book readers with some excellent work under his belt (he wrote the Errol Flynn, James Stewart and Gene Kelly retrospectives, as well as "The Films of The Forties" and a brilliant book called "The West That Never Was"), but with this book I feel he is not giving us his best.
I couldn't bear to give Tony less than 4 stars here. He has clearly made a tremendous effort with this, as always.
This is basically charting the career of the great movie composer Harry Warren, who worked with lyricist Al Dubin to create all those great songs you'll remember from the Busby Berkeley musicals of the mid-1930s - "42nd Street", "We're In The Money", "I Only Have Eyes For You" and so on. It's quite a big book, bigger than standard for Citadel (I only have two other books from them that are this big - "They Had Faces Then" and "Those Glorious Glamour Years").
This book departs somewhat from the usual winning formula in that it devotes an awful lot of pages to actual sheet music, which isn't really much use to us people who don't play the piano and just wanted a good read. I wouldn't like to have to count how many complete pages of sheet music are included, but I'm estimating it as 50, and quite a lot of the other pages have a substantial amount of music score on them too. If the author thought it was really important to include all that musical notation, and I can't really say I agree on that, it would have been better to my mind if it had been included in a separate free supplement.
Besides all the sheet music I could have done without, sadly the pictures aren't all that good in this book either.
Tony Thomas is a familiar and well-respected name amongst Citadel Press book readers with some excellent work under his belt (he wrote the Errol Flynn, James Stewart and Gene Kelly retrospectives, as well as "The Films of The Forties" and a brilliant book called "The West That Never Was"), but with this book I feel he is not giving us his best.
I couldn't bear to give Tony less than 4 stars here. He has clearly made a tremendous effort with this, as always.
Displaying 1 of 1 review