Warning Shadows
Home Alone with Classic Cinema
29 June 2010
Description
A brilliantly insightful and witty examination of beloved and little-known films, directors, and stars by one of America’s most esteemed critics.
Reviews
"Giddins is the ideal couch companion, erudite but relaxed and witty; his perceptive commentary shows that it’s not what you watch, it’s how you watch it." — Publishers Weekly
"Witty, informed, insightful...Warning Shadows makes me want to watch or re-watch nearly every movie [Giddins] discusses." — Lawrence Levi, Los Angeles Times
"Giddins writes with empathy and insight on such cinematic icons as Edward G. Robinson and Joan Crawford, paying close attention to the meanings of their mannerisms and their enduring fascination as creators of quirky behavior. The essays on directors Samuel Fuller and Sidney Lumet are shrewd appreciations of their cinematic styles; unlike most film reviewers, Giddins knows his way around visual language and uses his jazzy sense of verbal style to zero in on cinematic touches that convey a vision of the world." — Joseph McBride, San Francisco Chronicle
"Most film fanatics I know keep several film guides within arm's reach of their home cinemas, then use supplementary texts by such writers as Peter Bogdanovich, Gerald Mast and Ephraim Katz. To this batch on my shelf, I have added Warning Shadows." — William Kist, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"[S]hould be in the knapsack or survival kit of every Golden Age Hollywood enthusiast/amateur scholar/completist queen as a standby Bible for instruction, inspiration, and succor." — James Wolcott, VanityFair.com
"[Giddins'] first book wholly devoted to movies is the real deal, a deeply reflective work bristling with the kind of scholarship that also feels spontaneous.... Giddins’s headlong sentences and rapid-fire associations sometimes remind me of Preston Sturges: the apparent chaos is under total control." — Tim Appelo, Columbia Journalism Review
Also By: Gary Giddins 
Jazz
Hardback, 2009
The story of jazz for the general reader as it has never been told before, from the inside out: a comprehensive, eloquent, scrupulously researched page-turner.
