Richard Maltby is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Screen Studies at Flinders University, South Australia. He moved to Flinders from the UK, where he established the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture at the University of Exeter, before becoming Research Professor in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University.
His publications include Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (Routledge, 2011), Hollywood Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell), Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century (Harrap). 'Film Europe' and 'Film America': Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1925-1939, co-edited with Andrew Higson (UEP 1999), was winner of the prestigious Prix Jean Mitry for cinema history in 2000.
He is a Series Editor of Exeter Studies in Film History.

This book "decodes" 1930s Hollywood movies and explains why they looked and behaved as they did. Representing the summation of Richard Maltby's four decades of scholarship in the field, it uses a series of case studies to demonstrate how an appreciation of these movies is enhanced by examining the circumstances of their production and consumption.