We love to promote the works of our Authors when we can, and today is one of those fine days! Our Author Ralph Schiller has penned a new book about one of the old time stars we baby boomers remember from theatres and television that is all but forgotten today except for TCM showings, and hardcore classic film buffs. The Complete Films of Broderick Crawford is a gem of a book and here are some more details:
From Amazon.com…:
Today the name Broderick Crawford means nothing to twenty-first century young people. As far as they’re concerned, All The King’s Men is a miserable movie starring Sean Penn! They have absolutely no idea that way back in the twentieth century Broderick Crawford was a highly-paid major box-office Hollywood film star who made over ninety motion pictures. He also won the prized Academy Award Oscar for “Best Actor In A Starring Role”. On top of that he starred in an enormously successful, blockbuster television series that ran for decades in world-wide syndication making him an unpaid babysitter for an entire generation of baby boomers. In the pages of this book, the reader will discover an extraordinary actor and film star with an incredible body of work. He enjoyed a durable career in show business spanning forty-five years that hit Hollywood’s lofty heights and bottom-scraping depths more than once.
Reviews:
Comparing the Golden Age of Hollywood to the New Hollywood that exists in the millennium – the foundation, structure and every aspect is impossible. The studio system was the backbone of the picture business from its infancy to its decline in the early fifties. The studios discovered, trained, protected, and covered for their actors and actresses in the years when there was true glamour. The focus of Ralph Schiller’s new book The Complete Films of Broderick Crawford is on this period of time, when Mr. Crawford was one of those distinguished players. Born into a show business family (his father Lester was a Vaudeville headliner and his mother a former Ziegfeld girl, Broadway stage and film actress who appeared in the highly revered film Top Hat) as a young man Brod yearned to carry on in his parents’ footsteps. Author Schiller traces Brod’s early theatrical steps from his debut on stage at London’s West End to his return to the Broadway stage, through ninety-five feature films and hundreds of television appearances. Schiller’s writing is crisp, informative, and paced to hold the reader’s attention. With a bountiful amount of research and never-before-seen photographs, this tome should please readers of all ages who have an affection for vintage Hollywood and the larger than life Broderick Crawford.
Ralph has created a guide for all baby-boomers to the films of an icon of our childhood. We first saw him as the head of TV’s Highway Patrol which are still being run today. What we came to realize is that Broderick Crawford was an Academy Award winning Best Actor who made a variety of films about cowboys, politicians, mobsters, and more, earning him not one but two stars (one for movies & one for television) on the Hollywood Walk of Fame! I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Brod’s late his son Kelly and I’m very grateful to Ralph for writing this outstanding tribute to one of my heroes.
Author Ralph Schiller with the show’s original highway patrol car
Thanks to Karl Holmberg for the heads up!
— David DeWitt
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