Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory: Hollywood's Genius Bad Boy [Hardcover]

"In a world where film buffs can choose from among 15 biographies and critical studies of John Ford and an equal number devoted to George Cukor, a book about the life and work of Edmund Goulding, the underrated and multitalented director of, among others, Grand Hotel, The Dawn Patrol, and the Bette Davis weepies The Old Maid, The Great Lie, and Dark Victory, is long overdue....Matthew Kennedy, who teaches anthropology at City College of San Francisco and film history at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, has balanced scholarship with spice, unveiling the dark (alcoholism, drug-taking, and orgies) as well as the victories in the bisexual filmmaker's life. Goulding's brief marriage to tubercular dancer Marjorie Moss (Louise Brooks said he 'filled the last three years of her life with beauty') is intriguing, in a De-Lovely way. His sordid side helps to explain his anomalous noir masterpiece Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power, whose sleek beauty was just beginning to crumple around the edges: Now we know just how a guy could sink so low."—San Francisco Weekly

“Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory provides a welcome look at a man whose career deserves reexamination.”—Silent Era Film Books

Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory: Hollywood’s Genius Bad Boy is the first biography ever written about this eccentric genius of early-twentieth-century filmmaking. Goulding (1891–1959) was by turns a writer, producer, composer, and actor, but it is as a director that he made an indelible impression. He is most remembered today as the director of Grand Hotel, the great Event Movie of the Depression. At the dawn of sound, he wrote the story for the Academy Award–winning musical The Broadway Melody and collaborated memorably with Gloria Swanson and Joseph Kennedy for The Trespasser. He excelled at anti-war drama (White Banners, The Dawn Patrol, We Are Not Alone), fantastic Bette Davis weepies (Dark Victory, The Old Maid, The Great Lie), lilting romantic dramas (The Constant Nymph, Claudia), big-budget literary adaptations (The Razor’s Edge), and even film noir (Nightmare Alley). The London-born Goulding was a complicated and contradictory man whose notorious orgies, bisexuality, drinking, and drug addictions were whispered about in Hollywood for years. Yet his well-crafted plots and compelling characters set a new standard in American cinema and had a profound influence on the future of filmmaking.

Matthew Kennedy teaches anthropology at City College of San Francisco and film history at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has written for numerous publications and is author of Marie Dressler.