Customer Reviews

Films of Barbara Stanwyck

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THE FILMS OF BARBARA STANWYCK (1985) is one of the rarer titles in the Citadel Press filmography series as it was published almost 20 years after the first entries in the series that went through many editions and are easily obtainable (Davis, Crawford, Hepburn, etc.) Who knows why it took the publisher so long to get around to Stanwyck, surely on everyone's list as one of the top dozen women stars in film history, but this book was published not long before the series pretty much dried up and as a result appears to have only had single printings in both hardcover and softcover format. So if you ever run across it at a reasonable price, grab it!

The book is written by one of the better Citadel authors, Homer Dickens, and is loaded of course with photos of the great lady throughout her film and television career (although it was published before her final work on the TV series THE COLBYS). The "foreward" by Frank Capra is actually a excerpt from his autobiography, however. Ella Smith's STARRING MISS BARBARA STANWYCK still remains "the" book on Stanwyck but THE FILMS OF BARBARA STANWYCK is most definately a very honorable second place.

As the first reviewer of this book has pointed out, _The Films of Barbara Stanwyck_ is one of the rarer entries in Citadel Books' notable "Films of..." series (along with Christopher Young's _The Films of Doris Day_); while the other reviewer states a softcover version is available, I've never seen one yet on Amazon or elsewhere, just the hardcover edition. As such, it commands a price well above that of most other books in the series, but it's very much well worth it, especially in combination with _Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck_ (which I also highly recommend).

Following the format of other volumes in this series, _The Films of Barbara Stanwyck_ is comprised of a concise biography of the star followed by short overviews/commentary on all her film work, along with hundreds of black-and-white photos. Homer Dickens has plainly done his homework; I've been able to locate several Stanwyck films from the data contained in this book. If you're a serious Stanwyck fan, you need this book.