The 50 MGM Films That Transformed Hollywood

Movies dont exist in a vacuum. Each MGM movie is a tiny piece of a large, colorful (although often black & white) quilt, with threads tying it into all of the rest of that studios product, going forward, yes, but also backwards, and horizontally and three dimensionally across its entire landscape. Not necessarily a best of compilation, this book discusses the films that for one reason or another (and not all of them good ones) changed the trajectory of MGM and the film industry in general, from the revolutionary use of Cinerama in 1962s How the West Was Won to Director Alfred Hitchcocks near extortion of the profits from the 1959 hit thriller North by Northwest. And there aere the studios on-screen self-shoutouts to its own past, or stars, in films like Party Girl (1958), the Thats Entertainment series, Garbo Talks (1984) Rain Man (1955) and De-Lovely (2004), or the studios acquisition of other successful franchises such as James Bond. But fear not, what we consider MGMs classic films all get their due here, often with a touch of irony or fascinating anecdote. Singin in the Rain (1952), for example, was in its day neither a financial blockbuster nor crtitically acclaimed but rather an excuse the studio to reuse some old songs which the studio already owned. TheWizard of Oz (1939) cost almost as much to make as Gone With the Wind (also 1939) took ten years to recoup its costs. But still, the MGM mystique endures. Like the popular Netflix series The Movies that Made Us, this is a fascinating look behind the scenes of the greatestand at times notoriousfilms ever made.