{"product_id":"the-great-movies-ii-isbn-9780767919869","title":"The Great Movies II","description":"Continuing the pitch-perfect critiques begun in \u003ci\u003eThe Great Movies\u003c\/i\u003e, Roger Ebert's \u003ci\u003eThe Great Movies II\u003c\/i\u003e collects 100 additional essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send readers back to films with a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm—or perhaps to an avid first-time viewing.  Neither a snob nor a shill, Ebert manages in these essays to combine a truly populist appreciation for today's most important form of popular art with a scholar's erudition and depth of knowledge and a sure aesthetic sense.  Once again wonderfully enhanced by stills selected by Mary Corliss, former film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, \u003ci\u003eThe Great Movies II \u003c\/i\u003eis a treasure trove for film lovers of all persuasions, an unrivaled guide for viewers, and a book to return to again and again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFilms featured in \u003ci\u003eThe Great Movies II\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e12 Angry Men · The Adventures of Robin Hood · Alien · Amadeus · Amarcord · Annie Hall · Au Hasard, Balthazar · The Bank Dick · Beat the Devil · Being There · The Big Heat · The Birth of a Nation · The Blue Kite · Bob le Flambeur · Breathless · The Bridge on the River Kwai · Bring Me the Head of Alfredo García · Buster Keaton · Children of Paradise · A Christmas Story · The Color Purple · The Conversation · Cries and Whispers · The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie · Don’t Look Now · The Earrings of Madame de . . .  · The Fall of the House of Usher · The Firemen’s Ball · Five Easy Pieces · Goldfinger · The Good, the Bad and the Ugly · Goodfellas · The Gospel According to Matthew · The Grapes of Wrath · Grave of the Fireflies · Great Expectations · House of Games · The Hustler · In Cold Blood · Jaws · Jules and Jim · \u003c\/i\u003eKieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy\u003ci\u003e · Kind Hearts and Coronets · King Kong · The Last Laugh · Laura · Leaving Las Vegas · Le Boucher · The Leopard · The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp · The Manchurian Candidate · The Man Who Laughs · Mean Streets · Mon Oncle · Moonstruck · The Music Room · My Dinner with Andre · My Neighbor Totoro · Nights of Cabiria · One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest · Orpheus · Paris, Texas · Patton · Picnic at Hanging Rock · Planes, Trains and Automobiles · The Producers · Raiders of the Lost Ark · Raise the Red Lantern · Ran · Rashomon · Rear Window · Rififi · The Right Stuff · Romeo and Juliet · The Rules of the Game · Saturday Night Fever · Say Anything · Scarface · The Searchers · Shane · Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs · Solaris · Strangers on a Train · Stroszek · A Sunday in the Country · Sunrise · A Tale of Winter · The Thin Man · This Is Spinal Tap ·Tokyo Story · Touchez Pas au Grisbi · Touch of Evil · The Treasure of the Sierra Madre · Ugetsu · Umberto D · Unforgiven · Victim · Walkabout · West Side Story · Yankee Doodle Dandy\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Ebert’s enthusiasm and . . . straightforward prose are ideal for examining films . . . You remember why he’s the only film critic ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[T]hese pieces reflect Ebert’s long, thoughtful, informed familiarity with these films.  His impeccable credentials as an accessible populist encourage thinking that his recommendations . . . may be taken to heart by mainstream moviegoers who avidly follow his newspaper and TV reviews.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An appreciation of the greatest movies by the greatest movie enthusiast . . . I read this book with pleasure, enlightenment, and a desire to see many of the movies again, because I had missed what Roger saw.” —Paul Theroux\u003cb\u003eROGER EBERT\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Urbana, Illinois, and attended local schools and the University of Illinois, where he was editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Daily Illini\u003c\/i\u003e.  After graduate study in English at the universities of Illinois, Cape Town, and Chicago, he became a film critic of the \u003ci\u003eChicago Sun-Times\u003c\/i\u003e in 1967 and won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975.  The same year, he began a long association with Gene Siskel on the TV program \u003ci\u003eSiskel and Ebert\u003c\/i\u003e.  After Siskel’s death in 1999, the program continued with Richard Roeper as \u003ci\u003eEbert and Roeper\u003c\/i\u003e, a show that is syndicated in more than two hundred markets.  Ebert was a lecturer on film in the University of Chicago’s Fine Arts Program, an adjunct professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Illinois, and received honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Film Institute, and the University of Colorado, where he conducted an annual shot-by-shot analysis of a film for thirty-five years at the Conference on World Affairs.  In 1999 he started an Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois, selecting films, genres, and formats he believed deserve more attention. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Great Movies\u003c\/i\u003e, the bestselling annual volume \u003ci\u003eRoger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eRoger Ebert’s Book of Film\u003c\/i\u003e, in addition to a dozen other books. He died in 2013.\u003cb\u003e12 Angry Men\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn form, \u003ci\u003e12 Angry Men\u003c\/i\u003e is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on \"the hottest day of the year,\" as twelve men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father. The film shows us nothing of the trial itself except for the judge's perfunctory, almost bored, charge to the jury. His tone of voice indicates that the verdict is a foregone conclusion. We hear neither prosecutor nor defense attorney, and learn of the evidence only secondhand, as the jurors debate it. Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But \u003ci\u003e12 Angry Men\u003c\/i\u003e never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe principle of reasonable doubt, the belief that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, is one of the most enlightened elements of our Constitution, although many Americans have had difficulty in accepting it. \"It's an open-and-shut case,\" snaps Juror No. 3 (Lee J. Cobb) as the jury first gathers in their claustrophobic little room. When the first ballot is taken, ten of his fellow jurors agree, and there is only one holdout—Juror No. 8 (Henry Fonda).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is a film where tension comes from personality conflict, dialogue, and body language, not action; where the defendant has been glimpsed only in a single brief shot; where logic, emotion, and prejudice struggle to control the field. It is a masterpiece of stylized realism—the style coming in the way the photography and editing comment on the bare bones of the content. Released in 1957, when Technicolor and lush production values were common, \u003ci\u003e12 Angry Men\u003c\/i\u003e was lean and mean. It got ecstatic reviews and a spread in \u003ci\u003eLife\u003c\/i\u003e magazine but was a disappointment at the box office. Over the years it has found a constituency, however, and in a 2002 Internet Movie Database poll it was listed twenty-third among the best films of all time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story, based on a television play by Reginald Rose, was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet, with Rose and Henry Fonda acting as coproducers and putting up their own money to finance it. It was Lumet's first feature, although he was much experienced in TV drama, and the cinematography was by the veteran Boris Kaufman, whose credits (\u003ci\u003eOn the Waterfront\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLong Day's Journey into Night\u003c\/i\u003e) show a skill for tightening the tension in dialogue exchanges. The cast included only one bankable star, Fonda, but the other eleven actors were among the best then working in New York, including Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, and Robert Webber. They smoke, they sweat, they swear, they sprawl, they stalk, they get angry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a length of only ninety-five minutes (it sometimes feels as if the movie is shot in real time), the jurors are all defined in terms of their personalities, backgrounds, occupations, prejudices, and emotional tilts. Evidence is debated so completely that we feel we know as much as the jury does, especially about the old man who says he heard the murder and saw the defendant fleeing, and the lady across the street who says she saw it happen through the windows of a moving El train. We see the murder weapon, a switchblade knife, and hear the jurors debate the angle of the knife wound. We watch as Fonda imitates the shuffling step of the old man, a stroke victim, to see if he could have gotten to the door in time to see the murderer fleeing. In its ingenuity, in the way it balances one piece of evidence against another that seems contradictory, \u003ci\u003e12 Angry Men\u003c\/i\u003e is as meticulous as the summation of an Agatha Christie thriller.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut it is not about solving the crime. It is about sending a young man to die. The movie is timely in view of recent revelations that many death row convictions are based on contaminated evidence. \"We're talking about somebody's life here,\" the Fonda character says. \"We can't decide in five minutes. Supposing we're wrong?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe defendant, when we glimpse him, looks \"ethnic\" but of no specific group. He could be Italian, Turkish, Indian, Jewish, Arabic, Mexican. His eyes are ringed with dark circles, and he appears exhausted and frightened. In the jury room, some jurors make veiled references to \"these people.\" Finally Juror No. 10 (Ed Begley) begins a racist rant: \"You know how these people lie. It's born in them. They don't know what the truth is. And let me tell you, they don't need any real big reason to kill someone, either . . .\" As he continues, one juror after another stands up from the jury table and walks away, turning his back. Even those who think the defendant is guilty can't sit and listen to Begley's prejudice. The scene is one of the most powerful in the movie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe vote, which begins as eleven to one, shifts gradually. Although the movie is clearly in favor of the Fonda position, not all of those voting \"guilty\" are portrayed negatively. One of the key characters is Juror No. 4 (E. G. Marshall), a stockbroker wearing rimless glasses, who depends on pure logic and tries to avoid emotion altogether. Another juror, No. 7 (Jack Warden), who has tickets to a baseball game, grows impatient and changes his vote just to hurry things along. Juror No. 11 (George Voskovec), an immigrant who speaks with an accent, criticizes him: \"Who tells you that you have the right to play like this with a man's life?\" Earlier, No. 11 was attacked as a foreigner: \"They come over and in no time at all they're telling us how to run the show.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe visual strategy of the movie is discussed by Lumet in his \u003ci\u003eMaking Movies\u003c\/i\u003e, one of the most intelligent and informative books ever written about the cinema. In planning the movie, he says, a \"lens plot\" occurred to him: To make the room seem smaller as the story continued, he gradually changed to lenses of longer focal lengths, so that the backgrounds seemed to close in on the characters. \"In addition,\" he writes, \"I shot the first third of the movie above eye level, shot the second third at eye level and the last third from below eye level. In that way, toward the end the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie.\" In the film's last shot, he observes, he used a wide-angle lens \"to let us finally breathe.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood. By gradually lowering his camera, Lumet illustrates another principle of composition: A higher camera tends to dominate; a lower camera tends to be dominated. As the film begins we look down on the characters, and the angle suggests they can be comprehended and mastered. By the end, they loom over us, and we feel overwhelmed by the force of their passion. Lumet uses close-ups rarely, but effectively: One man in particular--Juror No. 9 (Joseph Sweeney, the oldest man on the jury)—is often seen in full frame, because he has a way of cutting to the crucial point and stating the obvious after it has eluded the others.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor Sidney Lumet, born in 1924, \u003ci\u003e12 Angry Men\u003c\/i\u003e was the beginning of a film career that has often sought controversial issues. Consider these titles from among his forty-three films: \u003ci\u003eThe Pawnbroker\u003c\/i\u003e (the Holocaust), \u003ci\u003eFail-Safe\u003c\/i\u003e (accidental nuclear war), \u003ci\u003eSerpico\u003c\/i\u003e (police corruption), \u003ci\u003eDog Day Afternoon\u003c\/i\u003e (homosexuality), \u003ci\u003eNetwork\u003c\/i\u003e (the decay of TV news), \u003ci\u003eThe Verdict\u003c\/i\u003e (alcoholism and malpractice), \u003ci\u003eDaniel\u003c\/i\u003e (a son punished for the sins of his parents), \u003ci\u003eRunning on Empty\u003c\/i\u003e (radical fugitives), and \u003ci\u003eCritical Care\u003c\/i\u003e (health care). There are also comedies and a musical (\u003ci\u003eThe Wiz\u003c\/i\u003e). If Lumet is not among the most famous of American directors, that is only because he ranges so widely he cannot be categorized. Few filmmakers have been so consistently respectful of the audience's intelligence.","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304492323045,"sku":"NP9780767919869","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780767919869.jpg?v=1767739642","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-great-movies-ii-isbn-9780767919869","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}