Movie Love in the Fifties

"Against the pressure critics face these days to report on box-office grosses or crank out quick, silly punditry on the state of the culture, he defends the honor of the passionate mind. The downside to Harvey's freedom is that the general points he's making are sometimes hard to grasp. But when a thesis does intermittently appear, it's thought-provoking...Though Harvey is not the first to make these observations, he's a deft synthesizer who brings together strains of film criticism that usually repel each other...[I]n the tradition of Pauline Kael, he composes charmingly excitable sentences, which often rely on italics for emphasis. And he responds viscerally and entertainingly to actors, reading body language and gauging sex appeal and celebrating those who somehow preserved their unaccountable strangeness."Harvey, James is the author of 'Movie Love in the Fifties' with ISBN 9780306811777 and ISBN 0306811774.