Alistair Cooke at the Movies

'Alistair Cooke had a unique critical voice . . . To spend a few hours in his company – even when he's writing about movies that are sometimes lost to memory – is to experience the lost joys of seemingly casual wit and elegance'
Richard Schickel

Long before Alistair Cooke became known for his Letter from America BBC broadcasts, he was a film reviewer. He began writing about cinema as a Cambridge undergraduate and continued to report on film when he went to live in New York, never losing his passion for the movies.

This vivid and fascinating new collection brings together the very best of Cooke's writing about film. It selects the most sparkling of his little-known film reviews, and contains his journalism on everything from the trauma of the Hollywood blacklist to the robbery of Zsa Zsa Gabor's jewels. It also includes his affectionate recollections of various stars he knew and admired, among them Charlie Chaplin and Humphrey Bogart.

Covering seventy-five years of brilliant reporting, Alistair Cooke at the Movies, edited by Geoff Brown, gives us a new insight into the world of film, and into the work of one of the twentieth century's most beloved writers.

'Opens windows into the history of a medium . . . the highlights of this thorough volume are Cooke's reminiscences of his meetings with the stars'
The Times Literary Supplement