Grand Hotel -- Philadelphia Story -- The Maltese Falcon -- Meet Me in St. Louis.
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Summary
Speaking about the kind of filmmaking now known as Classic Hollywood, the most popular and influential cinema ever invented, Vincente Minnelli once gave away its secret: ""I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate."" What are those hidden things? Can we invent a method that will enable us to discover them? Robert Ray attempts to answer those questions by looking closely at four movies from the 1930-1945 period when the American studio system reached the peak of its economic.