This second edition of William Rothman's classic includes fourteen new essays and a new foreword.

1. Hollywood reconsidered: reflections on the classical American cinema; 2. D. W. Griffith and the birth of the movies; 3. Judith of Bethulia; 4. True heart Griffith; 5. The ending of City Lights; 6. The Goddess: reflections on melodrama east and west; 7. Red Dust: the erotic screen image; 8. Virtue and villainy in the face of the camera; 9. Pathos and transfiguration in the face of the camera: a reading of Stella Dallas; 10. Viewing the world in black and white: race and the melodrama of the unknown woman; 11. Howard Hawks and Bringing Up Baby; 12. The filmmaker in the film: Octave and the rules of Renoir's game; 13. Stagecoach and the quest for selfhood; 14. To have and to have not adapted a film from a novel; 15. Hollywood and the rise of suburbia; 16. Nobody's perfect: Billy Wilder and the postwar American cinema; 17. The River; 18. Vertigo: the unknown woman in Hitchcock; 19. North by Northwest: Hitchcock's monument to the Hitchcock film; 20. The villain in Hitchcock; 21. Thoughts on Hitchcock's authorship; 22. Eternal vérités: cinema-vérité and classical cinema; 23. Visconti's Death in Venice; 24. Alfred Guzzetti's Family Portrait Sittings; 25. The taste for beauty; 26. A Tale of Winter: philosophical thought in the films of Eric Rohmer; 27. The 'New Latin American Cinema'; 28. What is American about American film study.