Czech-born refugee Karel Reisz (1926-2002) is widely regarded as one of the seminal figures in post-war British cinema. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz was a founder member of the independent Free Cinema ‘movement’ which attacked the parochial middle-class values of home-grown studio product with a vigorous commitment to everyday working-class subject matter and a poetically-charged film style. This was immediately recognisable in the aesthetic of the international success of Reisz’s first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). As the import of Free Cinema rapidly dissipated during the ‘Swinging London’ era, Reisz confronted the changing cultural mores of the 1960s and ‘70s with a series of ambivalent films that critique the anarchic free spirit of the times, including Morgan (1966), Isadora (1968), The Gambler (1974) and Dog Soldiers (1978). Drawing on Reisz’s early film criticism for Sequence and Sight and Sound, as well as interdisciplinary methodologies, this first career-length study explores Reisz’s personal brand of character-based realism, offering the spectator a privileged insight into an artist’s developing response to subjective and historical dislocation. The book should thus prove invaluable to film scholars, cultural historians and the Reisz aficionado.

Critically surveys the films of Tony Richardson, one of Britain’s most inventive directors of stage and screen.

Over thirty years of interviews with the American director of such classic films as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The African Queen, and The Night of the Iguana

Czech-born refugee Karel Reisz (1926-2002) is widely regarded as one of the seminal figures in post-war British cinema. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz was a founder member of the independent Free Cinema 'movement' which attacked the parochial middle-class values of home-grown studio product with a vigorous commitment to everyday working-class subject matter and a poetically-charged film style. This was immediately recognisable in the aesthetic of the international success of Reisz's first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

This concise, authoritative volume analyses critically the work of 100 British directors, from the innovators of the silent period to contemporary auteurs.

As pointed out in my last two publications, no comprehensive study has been undertaken about the American Learned Men and Women with Czechoslovak roots. The aim of this work is to correct this glaring deficiency, with the focus on immigration from the period of mass migration and beyond, irrespective whether they were born in their European ancestral homes or whether they have descended from them. Whereas in the two mentioned monographs, the emphasis has been on scholars and social and natural scientists; and men and women in medicine, applied sciences and engineering, respectively, the present compendium deals with notable Americans of Czechoslovak ancestry in arts and letters, and in education. With respect to women, although most professional fields were closed to them through much of the nineteenth century, the area of arts and letters was opened to them, as noted earlier and as this compendium authenticates.