HARVEY, James 1929-

PERSONAL:

Born August 10, 1929, in Chicago, IL; son of Howard Malcum (an attorney and electrical engineer) and Loretta (a court reporter and manager of a retail store; maiden name, Hughes) Harvey. Education: Loyola University of Chicago, A.B., 1951; University of Michigan, M.A., 1954. Politics: "Democratic Socialist."

ADDRESSES:

Home—152 President St., Brooklyn, NY 11231. Office—Department of English, State University of New York—Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794. Agent—Robert Cornfield, 145 West 79 St., New York, NY 10024.

CAREER:

University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, instructor in English, 1954-55; St. John's University, Jamaica, NY, instructor in English, 1957-60; State University of New York, Stony Brook, instructor, 1960-67, assistant professor, 1967-89, associate professor of English, 1988—. New School for Social Research, instructor in film, 1975-80; University of California, Berkeley, visiting professor of film, 1989. Volunteer at Brooklyn Inter-Faith Shelter for the Homeless. Military service: U.S. Army, 1955-57; became corporal.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Hopwood Prize, University of Michigan, 1952.

WRITINGS:

Dissenters (play), produced in New Haven, CT, at Long Wharf Theatre, 1974.

Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges, Knopf (New York, NY), 1987.

Movie Love in the Fifties, Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

Author of the play, Nags Head, 1969. Past film critic, Westsider. Contributor of articles and reviews to magazines, including New York Review of Books, Film Comment, and Commonweal.

SIDELIGHTS:

Playwright, essayist, and critic, James Harvey is best known for his writing about movies. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges examines the screwball films of the 1930s and 40s. Critic Harvey noted a profound difference between the pre-and post-war periods in Movie Love in the Fifties as he explores a period in film history that bridges the abandonment of the polished studio-system films for what would become a new genre of cinema in the late 1960s. In his review of Movie Love in the Fifties for Cineaste, Gilberto Perez, a professor of film studies at Sarah Lawrence College, wrote, " Movie Love in the Fifties belongs next to Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges on the small shelf of first-rate books about the movies." Perez wrote that in Harvey's film criticism, "the ordinary moviegoer, the lover of movies, is combined with the intellectual who takes movies seriously." In her New York Times review of Movie Love in the Fifties, Sarah Kerr described Harvey as a "deft synthesizer who brings together strains of film criticism that usually repel each other." A contributor to Kirkus Reviews praised Harvey for being not only a "sophisticated guide to the decade and its movies," but also for offering "refreshing, common-sense insight."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 2001, Mike Tribby, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 468.

Boston Globe, December 13, 1987.

Choice, W. K. Huck, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 1967.

Cineaste, Gilberto Perez, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, summer, 2002, p. 52.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2001, p. 1189.

Library Journal, October 1, 2001, Jayne Plymale, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 103.

Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1988.

New York Review of Books, July 21, 1988.

New York Times, December 22, 1987; October 29, 2001, Janet Maslin, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. E6; January 6, 2002, Sarah Kerr, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 9.

New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1987; January 13, 2002, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 22; January 20, 2002, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 18; June 2, 2002, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 27.

Publishers Weekly, August 6, 2001, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 71.

Raritan, winter, 1988.

US Weekly, Janet Steen, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 57.

Variety, Wendy Smith, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 29.

Washington Post, December 27, 1987; October 15, 2001, Dennis Drabelle, review of Movie Love in the Fifties, p. C8.*