During Hollywood’s silent era, most people remember Rudolph Valentino as cinema’s reigning “Latin Lover.” But there was another dashing, dark-eyed actor who, though now mostly forgotten, regularly challenged Valentino for the crown.

Ramon Novarro was for many years in the 1920s a hot property in Hollywood and one of the industry’s most sought-after romantic leading men. As one of MGM’s top box-office attractions, Novarro headlined such classic films as “The Student Prince,” “Mata Hari” and the original, silent version of “Ben-Hur,” and shared the screen with such luminous leading ladies as Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer.

But his film legacy was tarnished by the sordid nature of his untimely death, and that story is told in grim detail in the riveting but tragic biography “Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro” (University Press of Mississippi, $25). The 416-page paperback is the work of Andre Soares, a California screenwriter who is also chief editor of “Alternative Film Guide.”

Soares’ writes that Novarro was born Ramon Samaniego to a prominent Mexican family. He came to America in 1913 to flee the violence of civil war in his native country.

Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, Novarro was a Latin heartthrob, idolized by millions and the star of some 50 motion pictures, whose fame as a “Latin lover” rivaled Valentino’s (who was, in fact, Italian).

A lifelong bachelor who carefully cultivated his image as a man deeply devoted to his family and his Roman Catholic faith, Novarro was settled into easy retirement in a comfortable Spanish-style home in Laurel Canyon by 1968. And that’s when his legacy was radically changed.

On Halloween of that year, Novarro’s nude, bloodied corpse was found in his house, igniting one of Hollywood’s most infamous scandals. As it turns out, the actor’s off-screen life was far removed from his romantic on-screen image, and for many years he hid his homosexuality as he regularly enjoyed the company of male hustlers.

Soares’ gruesomely specific account details how Novarro’s night with two young male companions ended in tragedy and scandal.

Soares presents the full picture in grim, colorful detail, not only of the star’s rise to fame and his emotional conflicts over his sexual orientation, but of the grisly nature of his death and its sensational aftermath (in which brothers Paul and Tom Ferguson were convicted of murder).

Exhaustively researched and drawing on fresh interviews with Novarro’s surviving friends, family, co-stars and the men convicted of his murder, “Beyond Paradise” offers many unique insights into the conflicted life of one of Hollywood’s most important early stars. It’s a compelling and fascinating dissection of myth and murder and the often disturbing disconnect between a life lived on screen and the one lived off.

- Dennis King

There’s a picture of Sean Connery in white shirt and tie riding a vintage Schwinn bicycle around the Universal back lot during the filming of “Marnie.” There’s Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth pedaling a French-made tandem bicycle on a break from shooting “The Lady in Question.” There’s a photo of Ray Walston and Anthony Perkins playing bicycle polo during a break in filming “Tall Story.” And there’s sour-faced Alfred Hitchcock awkwardly straddling a bike at the Cannes Film Festival while promoting “Frenzy.”

These are just a few of the vintage photos contained in film critic Steven Rea’s whimsical, fascinating coffee-table book “Hollywood Rides a Bike: Cycling With the Stars” (Angel City Press, $20), an affectionate homage to two of the author’s great passions – movies and bicycles.

The image-filled, 160-page book features candid photos and studio publicity shots of stars tooling around studio back lots and through various Hollywood neighborhoods aboard an array of bicycles – ranging from rust-bucket clunkers to sleek racing bikes and from decked-out street cruisers to odd-ball experimental rides and antique high-wheels.

The roster of stars caught in candid cycling moments is delightful and dazzling. There’s Humphrey Bogart in suit and tie, a flirtatious Sophia Loren, a teenaged Elizabeth Taylor, a young Lauren Bacall, a sprightly Shirley Temple, a cool Kevin Bacon, a nubile Brigitte Bardot and much more. It’s like the Hollywood Walk of Fame on two (and sometimes three) wheels.

Rea, longtime film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is an avid cycling enthusiast. He says he doesn’t own a car, but he does have a collection of several rare and vintage bicycles.

About a year ago, Rea hit upon the inspiration to combine his passion for cycling and his love of movie history (and his penchant for hunting down rare old photos of stars on wheels) into a Tumblr web blog (Rides a Bike). The response was immediate and enthusiastic. Soon, emails and accolades were flooding in, and Rea discovered a new world of sources for movie star photos and anecdotes.

Turns out movie buffs and bike fanatics are simpatico crowds. The blog begat the book, and now the book appears to be drawing more and more people to the blog.

And Rea, who as film critics will, waxes poetic in words and imagery about the glamour of movie stardom and the glory of whizzing around like a free and zestful child on two wheels.

With new photos being discovered every day, and with several search targets on his radar (Rea is determined to find a picture of Albert Finney on a bike), the author hints that “Hollywood Rides a Bike: The Sequel” might come rolling along in the future.

- Dennis King

Among movie actresses of her generation, when melodrama was an accepted currency and bigger often meant better, Barbara Stanwyck was somehow earthier, less glamorous, far more real than most.

There was – and still is – such a thing as a “Stanwyck performance,” where beneath the artifice of the acting is a sly, driven and knowing presence that somehow connects to real life in ways the Hollywood dream factory could never dream up.

That quality made Stanwyck a unique actress in her time and contributes to her steadily growing status since her death in 1990, and it’s largely the focus of Dan Callahan’s sharp, new, career-oriented biography, “Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman” (University Press of Mississippi, $35).

With so many details of Stanwyck’s childhood and early career lost to time – the actress was loathe to talk about her upbringing – Callahan’s book looks most acutely at her movies, her career choices and what they might reveal about the woman herself. A certain amount of speculation and biographical license might enter the equation, but largely Callahan’s insights and instincts about his subject ring out as sympathetic, reasonable and well founded.

He neatly lays out the biographical facts we know: Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens in 1907 in Brooklyn. Her father disappeared early on and her mother was run over by a streetcar when Ruby was 3. Afterward, she was cared for by her older sister and later lived in a series of foster homes.

There’s some evidence that she suffered from abuse, even after she was grown and married to vaudevillian Frank Fay, an alcoholic and anti-Semitic perhaps best known as the original Elwood P. Dowd of Broadway’s “Harvey.” She also apparently had unhappy dalliances with certain gangsters during her days as a chorus girl and later with star Al Jolson, whom she referred to as “a real son of a bitch.”

After a rocky start in early films like “Ten Cents a Dance,” Stanwyck found her acting muse in director Frank Capra, who seemed to get her raw, earthy appeal and cast her in a series of strong films from 1930-32 (including “The Miracle Woman,” “Forbidden” and “The Bitter Tea of General Yen”).

Callahan duly notes Stanwyck’s sharp instincts and tough-mindedness in going forward, choosing roles, scripts and directors that perfectly fit her personality, skills and ambitions. In rich succession she teamed with King Vidor on “Stella Dallas” (1937), Cecil B. DeMille on “Union Pacific” (1939), Preston Sturges on “The Lady Eve” (1941), Howard Hawks on “Ball of Fire” (1941), again with Capra on “Meet John Doe” (1941) and Billy Wilder on “Double Indemnity” (1944).

While Callahan covers Stanwyck’s second marriage to Robert Taylor, which failed after his infidelity, and her romance with the much younger Robert Wagner, he mostly measures her life through her work. While many of her contemporaries saw their stars fade with age, Stanwyck always retained her passion for work, even in lesser roles such as the Elvis starrer “Roustabout” (1964) and the TV western “The Big Valley” (1965-69).

Late in her life, she accepted roles that were clearly beneath her abilities (on the Aaron Spelling spinoff of “Dynasty,” which she quickly left). But, Callahan points out, she never gave a performance less than her best. She was, he notes, one of the first movie stars of her time to employ observed behavior rather than conventional acting techniques, and it’s one of the things that make her acting seem modern and timeless.

Of her finest roles, Callahan writes: “Stanwyck loved the movies, even at their most extreme and artificial, yet she was the actress who most often reminded the movies of reality.”

- Dennis King

There’s a red-dirt grittiness in the voice of James Garner that marks him an unmistakable son of Oklahoma, and it comes through with honest if at times pugnacious clarity in the actor’s tell-all autobiography, “The Garner Files: A Memoir” (Simon & Schuster, $25.99).

Co-written with veteran editor Jon Winokur (appropriately enough, author of several “Portable Curmudgeon” collections), Garner’s frank recollections offer up a warts-and-all portrait of a man who achieved remarkable success in film and TV even as he scorned movie moguls, scoffed at high-flown acting techniques and waged court battles with studio bean counters that many warned might ruin his career.

Ever the rebel and outspoken liberal, Garner now looks back on his successful career with an uncommon willingness to own up to his own flaws as well as to point out those of his fellow stars. And that makes for some juicy anecdotes in this highly entertaining, behind-the-scenes show-biz saga.

Born James Scott Bumgarner in Norman on April 7, 1928, the actor who later adopted the stage name James Garner endured a rough-and-tumble life before he discovered acting. His half-Cherokee mother died when he was five, his alcoholic father bounced around from job to job and his wicked stepmother – whom Garner simply calls “the redhead” – beat and humiliated James and his brothers regularly. That is, until one day when James snapped and nearly strangled her to death.

After a stint in the merchant marine, an injury-plagued football career with the OU Sooners and an enlistment in the Army in which he saw combat and was wounded in Korea, Garner decided in his mid-20s to try acting. Small Broadway parts led to auditions in L.A. and his big break – being cast as the witty, free-wheeling gambler Bret Maverick in the late -1950s TV Western series, “Maverick.”

Garner minces no words in describing his legal battles with Warner Bros. over what he viewed as short pay for a lucrative, hit series. So he left the show and went to court against the studio to win his contract release and a cash settlement. He would do the same again the late 1970s, suing Universal Studios over money issues related to his hugely popular TV series, “The Rockford Files.”

While many advisers cautioned Garner that his litigiousness might scuttle his acting opportunities, the iconoclastic Okie notes with relish that these “rebellions” never kept him from getting acting work. Indeed, he was among the first in his profession to move easily between TV roles and big motion picture projects (resulting in a film resume that features roles in more than 50 movies – including landmark parts in “The Great Escape,” “The Americanization of Emily,” “Grand Prix,” “Victor Victoria” and an Oscar nomination for 1985’s “Murphy’s Romance”).

Garner is brutally honest about his own shortcomings (in fact, he boasts of being a thoroughly untrained actor and says he hates talking about his “craft”). And he’s equally frank in noting the flaws of his co-stars. He describes Charles Bronson as “a pain in the ass,” says he admired Steve McQueen but hated his egotistical preening, and describes how he once nearly got into a fistfight with Lee Marvin over that actor’s abuse of women and alcohol.

“The Garner Files” is rich with other star-studded anecdotes (one of the funniest concerning Gary Cooper’s penny-pinching ways) and loads of “outtakes” – some flattering and some not so – from family, friends and colleagues revealing the rigorously honest, down-to-earth personality of the man – now 83 years old – that many film scholars consider the greatest underrated actor of his era.

- Dennis King

In Hollywood’s Golden Age, Myrna Loy was a lovely paradox – a champagne-tippling sophisticate on-screen in her many roles opposite the dapper William Powell and a budding humanitarian off-screen with values that belied glittery show-business extravagance.

In “Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood” (University of California Press, $34.95), biographer, poet and memoirist Emily W. Leider puts together an engaging and heartening portrait of the classic movie star who never let the glamour of her impossibly glamorous profession go to her head.

Always down-to-earth and sensible, although graced with exotic looks that led to her discovery by Rudolph Valentino during the silent era, Loy enjoyed an extraordinary career in movies that spanned six decades and that eventually lead her to a post-acting career as goodwill ambassador for the Red Cross, the United Nations and UNESCO.

Born in 1905 to a middle-class family in Montana, Loy lost her father to an influenza epidemic in 1918 and moved with her mother to Culver City, Calif. There, she took dance and ballet lessons, training that Leider says instilled in Loy a lifelong sense of grace and timing that became hallmarks of her acting style.

Soon, Loy landed a place in the chorus line at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre and found bit parts in several movies. Her discovery in the 1920s by Valentino and her exotic looks led to her various casting as the daughter of Fu Manchu, a gypsy seductress and a Mexican spitfire.

But once she signed with MGM and was teamed with William Powell (they would eventually do 14 movies together – six of them in “The Thin Man” series), Loy’s career kicked into high gear. As Nora Charles, the better half to Powell’s debonair, often tipsy detective Nick Charles, Loy set the standard – and a lasting screen image – as the perfect partner: good sport, stylish wife and a gal who could match her witty husband quip for quip and drink for drink.

Leider offers anecdotes giving insights into many of Loy’s finest roles (“The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,” “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer”), her friendships with stars such as Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable (Cable, the author relates, once made a pass at Loy and she pushed him into a hedge) and her collaborations with filmmakers such as David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn and William Wyler.

But Loy didn’t allow herself to be defined by her stardom. Later in her life, she indulged her passion for activism and her notion of artists as ambassadors of peace. She served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and worked for other charitable causes and told friends that she got “more emotional satisfaction” from her charitable work than from her acting career. Loy died at age 88 in 1993; three years earlier she’d been awarded an honorary Oscar for career achievement.

- Dennis King

Some iconic movie directors’ off-screen lives seem so large, dramatic and event-packed that they threaten to overshadow their works on screen. Big, brawling, boozing, men’s-men directors such as Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks boast colorful, rousing, trouble-filled private biographies that seem positively Heminwayesque in competition with their creative lives.

Certainly, John Huston is a charter member of that macho fraternity, and his rich, raucous personal and professional experiences get a thorough, entertaining chronicling in “John Huston: Courage and Art” (Crown Archetype, $30), the first complete biography of the legendary filmmaker by prolific biographer Jeffrey Meyers, author of acclaimed studies of Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and many others.

Making ample use of original interviews with Huston’s Hollywood cronies and his children and relatives, as well as newly opened archival materials, the biographer offers up a vivid portrait of a truly great filmmaker (whose classics range through “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Asphalt Jungle” and “The African Queen”) and a larger-than-life adventurer and raconteur (at various times he was a champion boxer, a bullfighter, a big-game hunter and fisherman, a soldier, a gambler and a legendary womanizer).

Meyers colorfully details the Missouri-born Huston’s early life as a sickly child, son of famed actor Walter Huston, and how through sheer force of will young John one day rose from his sickbed, dove from a waterfall into a raging river and determined to pursue a strenuous life.

Though he dropped out of high school, Huston found success as an actor in the 1920s and a screenwriter in the 1930s, before making a dazzling debut behind the camera with 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon.” In a astoundingly productive directing career that yielded 37 feature films, 15 Oscar nominations and two Oscar wins (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Lifetime Achievement), plus directing turns that earned his father Walter (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and daughter Anjelica Huston (“Prizzi’s Honor”) acting Oscars, Huston also managed to live a life off-screen that rivaled any adventures he captured on film.

In addition to his vigorous outdoors and sporting adventures, Huston directed plays on Broadway and operas at La Scalia and engaged in rigorous political causes (he was a staunch opponent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts in Hollywood). He was a serious painter and art collector, a connoisseur of wine, food and literature (many of his great films were adaptations of novels), and an unabashed womanizer (he married five times to successively younger wives, and all ended badly).
So it doesn’t sound like hyperbole when Meyers calls Huston “one of the most fascinating men who ever lived.”

Indeed, as this fine and literate biography points out, Huston’s life was as ambitious as his art, and his art is truly enduring.

Meyers neatly sums up the creative drive and grit to the very end that Huston maintained in his remarkable life:

“Huston’s most outstanding quality was personal courage: braving the waterfall as a childhood invalid in Arizona, filming under fire in the Aleutians and in Italy, opposing the Communist witch hunt in Washington, shooting ‘The African Queen’ and ‘The Roots of Heaven’ under dangerous conditions in Africa, hunting elephants in Africa and tigers in India, riding recklessly in fox hunts in Ireland, winning a camel race in Nevada, marrying for the fifth time, making ‘Under the Volcano,’ ‘Prizzi’s Honor’ and ‘The Dead’ while confined to a wheelchair, gasping for breath and supported by a tank of oxygen.”

- Dennis King

One of the most enduring cinematic images of the hippie-dippy 1960s is of Dennis Hopper’s defiant biker Billy tooling down the highway – flowing long hair, floppy bushman’s hat and bandito mustache – astride a souped-up Harley chopper. The film was 1969’s “Easy Rider,” and Hopper was not only its co-star (with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson) but was also the movie’s co-writer, director and most dedicated, lifelong rebel.

In a film career that began with roles in 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause” and 1956’s “Giant,” opposite his fated mentor James Dean, and that forged indelible characters in pictures such as “Apocalypse Now,” “Blue Velvet,” “Hoosiers” and some 115 others, Hopper always maintained his bad-boy edge and air of earnest rebellion.

And the life of this most unpredictable of showbiz players is ably and almost too thoroughly surveyed in “Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel” (Barricade Books, $26.95), author Peter Winkler’s sporadically entertaining and exhaustively researched biography of one of the movie world’s most original and enigmatic characters on-screen and off.

In a career that spanned half a century of highs and lows, Hopper proved himself an artist always eager to push back boundaries. An award-winning actor, writer and director, a painter and photographer, a discerning collector of modern art, a notorious lady’s man and an eclectic counterculture figure, Hopper was definitely a Hollywood original, and publishers assert that this is the first book to chronicle his erratic life and career.

Winkler is certainly thorough and painstaking in detailing Hopper’s life trajectory – from his lonely childhood in rural Kansas through a career of some 200 on-screen roles (earning Oscar and Emmy nominations) and seven directing credits to his death last year from prostate cancer at age 74. Unfortunately, the author never interviewed his subject and most of the quotes in the book (even those of Hopper’s colleagues and co-stars) come from second-hand sources.

Winkler provides a encyclopedic tour of Hopper’s acting life, recounting his seminal early roles opposite Dean (with whom he clashed over the worth of Lee Strasberg and The Actors Studio in New York) through his “Easy Rider” period and the comedown failure of 1971’s “The Last Movie,” to the drug-fueled weirdness of his roles in “Apocalypse Now,” “Blue Velvet” and “River’s Edge,” to his late-career comeback as the reigning villain in big-budget actioners such as “Speed” and “Waterworld.”

In his personal life, Hopper’s world was no less erratic and eventful, and Winkler duly covers his long-standing romance with Natalie Wood; his five marriages (including his efforts to divorce his last wife even in the midst of terminal cancer); his sometimes quarrelsome friendships with Dean, Fonda, Elvis Presley and John Wayne; his drug and alcohol addictions and his mystical sojourn in Taos, N.M.; his emergence as a respected artist and photographer and his forward-looking patronage of modern artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein.

It’s all very methodical and detailed, even if the book occasionally threatens to get lost in turgid detail (do we really need to know the precise time, day and date of a staging for a one-act play Hopper wrote in high school?).

Still, “Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel” more than lives up to its title. It is indeed a wild ride – through biographical minutiae and sordid scandal, through name-dropping celebrity and dense psychological torment – to paint a pretty fascinating and compelling portrait of the artist who created Billy the biker, the man who went off in search of America.

- Dennis King

NEW YORK – For nearly 50 years, Roger Ebert has been the most prominent and influential voice among the ranks of America’s film critics. But in recent years, after three major surgeries to battle thyroid cancer he’s been left unable to speak.

But he has not been silenced. Ebert still writes movie reviews for the Chicago Sun Times, composes an influential blog on movies and other topics, produces a new public television movie review show and clearly loves movies and life with as much passion and analytical insight as ever.

On Tuesday evening, Ebert will sit down with fellow critic, A.O. Scott of the New York Times, to discuss (with assistance from a computer) movies, film criticism and his life as revealed in his new memoir, “Life Itself.” And folks in Oklahoma can submit questions and listen in to this sold-out event, part of the ongoing TimesTalks series staged at gleaming new Times Center, 242 W. 41st St.

The discussion is set for 6:30-8 p.m. (eastern time) Tuesday. Viewers can watch the program life on the web at Livestream.com/nytimes.com, and they can submit questions to Ebert via email at TimesTalks@nytimes.com.

Ebert, the first film critic ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, has been credited, along with his late fellow critic Gene Siskel, with bringing the once-arcane art of movie criticism to wide popularity with their long-running public TV show of movie reviews and barbed banter.

Five years ago, surgeries following thyroid cancer left Ebert unable to speak, eat or drink, and so his writing – while still evincing a remarkable intellect for movies – has turned to more diverse and personal matters. These wider insights into life and remembrances of his boyhood in Illinois and his golden journalism career have been gathered in his new book, “Life Itself: A Memoir.”

Among its personal revelations are chapters dealing with his struggles with alcoholism; his relationship with his strong, supportive wife Chazz; his stormy partnership with Gene Siskel; his friendships with Studs Terkel, Mike Royko, Oprah Winfrey and Russ Meyer (with whom he wrote “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”) and his encounters with various screen legends.

The Associated Press review called the book, “A gentle look back … as moving as it is amusing, fresh evidence that Roger Ebert is a writer who happens to love movies, not a movie lover who happens to write.”

- Dennis King

From the age of five, Alan Arkin knew he was destined for a life as an actor. Fascinated by every play, every movie he encountered, he knew early on that he wanted to devote his life to “pretending to be a human being.”

As Arkin tells it in his candid, revealing and decidedly anti-showbiz book “An Improvised Life: A Memoir” (Da Capo Press, $17), it wasn’t from some childhood trauma or a lack of self esteem that he was so vividly drawn to the “need to turn myself into something other than what I was.” Instead, he writes, “It is in our nature to be creative.”

That, and it seemed to him as a young boy and now as a 77-year-old man that he never quite felt comfortable just being himself. It was always easier to observe and mimic someone else’s manner of speaking, of walking, of getting through life’s obstacles.
In fact, he writes with typical self-effacement, “Outside of my life as an actor I had almost no life at all.”

It’s that honest modesty and no-nonsense approach to his craft that informs this memoir, which is devoid of gossipy insider Hollywood stories and long on thoughtful and practical observations on acting and the creative process.

It’s no accident that his memoir’s title stresses the word “improvised,” because improvisation seems to be the driving force of Arkin’s creative process and of his career, which got its professional start at an early incarnation of Chicago’s now legendary Second City troupe, where he honed his performing skills and learned both the practical and spiritual powers of improv.

Having forged a rich career in theater and film that includes a Tony Award for “Enter Laughing” on Broadway in 1963 and an Academy Award for the 2006 film “Little Miss Sunshine,” Arkin still says he prefers improvisation over all other forms of performance.

Acting on stage he describes as “torture.”

“You’re not encouraged to experiment or play very much,” he writes of appearing in a play. “The play gets set the minute opening night is there, and you’re supposed to do exactly that for the next year. And I am constitutionally unable to just find any of the excitement or creativity in that kind of experience.”

Now, having appeared in countless Broadway and off-Broadway shows and acted in more than 80 films, Arkin said he is content to limit his formal acting roles and spend his time spreading the gospel of improvisation to both actors and non-actors. From his home in New Mexico, Arkin travels around conducting highly regarded improv workshops that he maintains can help anyone who feels they are creatively “blocked.”

“An Improvised Life: A Memoir” is Arkin’s simple, direct testament to a life of artistic achievement, with embracing words of encouragement to anyone who longs to connect with their creative side.

- Dennis King

He was one of early Hollywood’s so-called “He-man” directors (along with Howard Hawks, John Ford and John Huston). He sported an eye patch and a dashing panache that earned him the affectionate nickname “the one-eyed bandit.” And he lived a life off-screen that was every bit as rugged, momentous and adventurous as the classic film stories he told on screen.

But compared to his more celebrated colleagues in that rough-and-tumble director’s fraternity, Raoul Walsh is today an odd man out. Despite a resume that includes such bona-fide classics as “High Sierra,” “White Heat,” “The Naked and the Dead” and despite having tracked down bandit Pancho Villa, discovered John Wayne and faced down gangster Bugsy Siegel, Walsh’s exploits have been largely forgotten.

That should be remedied somewhat with the publication of “Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director” (University Press of Kentucky, $40), the first full-length biography of the flamboyant director by film historian Marilyn Ann Moss.

In his time, Walsh (1887-1980) was regarded as one of the fledgling film industry’s most creative, daring and iconoclastic directors. His career behind the camera spanned a half century and ran from the one- and two-reel silents to the rebellious, cutting-edge 1960s and through many genres (gangster films such as “White Heat” and “The Roaring Twenties,” action movies like “They Died With Their Boots On,” war pictures such as “Objective Burma!” on through Westerns and even romances).
Moss covers the critical aspects of Walsh’s filmmaking with a thorough, thoughtful precision. But the most compelling and surprising aspects of her book focus on Walsh’s amazing life off screen.

During his youth in New York City, Walsh’s parents hobnobbed with the cultural elite – including artist Frederick Remington, President Teddy Roosevelt, showman Buffalo Bill and actor Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes Booth). The young Walsh got his start in Hollywood as an assistant director and cameraman to D.W. Griffith, and he even acted the role of John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s 1915 landmark film “The Birth of a Nation.”

Moss uncovers some amazing facts and rich anecdotes to color her portrait of this singular movie pioneer – touching on his close friendship and collaboration with swashbuckler Errol Flynn; his decision to change actor Marion Morrison’s name to John Wayne and cast him in “The Big Trail”; his encounter with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and his efforts to persuade Villa to make his life story into a movie; and his manly endeavors away from Hollywood that included cowpunching, hard drinking and enough adventure to truly make him a two-fisted legend.

Moss notes that Walsh is perhaps the last of the founding filmmakers in Hollywood who had been without a full, comprehensive biography.

“Walsh’s one hundred and forty films created a classic cinema of adventure, romance and American hard knocks both vigorous and tenderhearted,” Moss notes. “His films moved to the rhythm of bullets and came at audiences with style and energy… he helped to transform the Hollywood studio yarn into a breathless art form. He belongs to that generation of filmmakers who learned to make movies on a dime in a fledgling industry at the start of the Twentieth century and invented a Hollywood that made movies bigger than life itself.”

- Dennis King