Why do people go to see movies? Some say that it’s for the story or the genre or the suggested theme, and some say that it’s for the director, but this is often wishful thinking. Nearly everyone goes to the movies to see the stars, the actors, to see the people in them. And during the classic Hollywood period, running roughly from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, there was an explosion of distinctive talent, of stars like James Cagney, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and so many more.

Dan Callahan celebrates and analyzes many of the so-called “pre-Brando” actors of the classic Hollywood period and makes a case for their more heightened but just as valid style. Often dismissed as old-fashioned, these players deserve this new look and new reckoning that places them as icons of creativity and pleasure before more naturalistic Method actors of the 1950s like Brando and James Dean took over.