Director Nicholas Ray’s movies were noted for their darkly roiling emotional undercurrents, their compassion for wounded loners and outcasts and their gritty commitment to realism.

In works such as “They Live By Night,” his auspicious 1948 debut, to his 1955 masterwork “Rebel Without a Cause” and notable films such as “In a Lonely Place,” “Johnny Guitar” and “Bigger Than Life,” Ray cemented his reputation as a passionate champion of social misfits and as a consummate Hollywood outsider himself.

If the stories he told onscreen were rigorously troubling and haunting, Ray’s life off screen was even more so. The drama he lived outside his work is related in gripping, sometimes sordid, detail in “Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director” (Harper Collins/It Books, $29.99), by veteran Hollywood biographer Patrick McGilligan.

Long on carefully researched incident, anecdote and detail, if a bit short on critical analysis, McGilligan’s 560-page examination of Ray’s raucous life sets the stage with the colorful adventures of the man’s rambling youth.

As a restless young bohemian, Ray flirted with the worlds of protest music (he recorded and caroused with Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly), New York theater (he worked with Thornton Wilder and Elia Kazan), architecture (he befriended Frank Lloyd Wright) and leftist politics (he flirted with Communism and became entangled with the House Committee on Un-American Activities).

By the time he came to Hollywood in his thirties as a protégé of producer John Houseman, Ray was carrying along some hefty psychological baggage. And in typical show-biz fashion, his self-destructive urges were exacerbated by drink, drugs and women.

Over the years, Ray romanced a bevy of starlets, including Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Joan Crawford and a teenaged Natalie Wood. But his second marriage, to blond bombshell Gloria Grahame (who played opposite Humphrey Bogart in Ray’s noir thriller “In a Lonely Place”), left a lifelong scar, according to the author. The marriage was shattered when Ray found Grahame in bed with his teenage son from his first marriage.

Ray’s stillborn working partnership with young James Dean was also a source of tragedy in the director’s life. After forming a close bond with the gifted young actor on “Rebel Without a Cause,” Ray’s masterpiece of youthful angst, the two planned future projects together. But Dean’s untimely death in a car crash left Ray devastated and drove him deep into a netherworld of drink and drugs.

True to the subtitle of the book, McGilligan duly follows Ray’s precipitous fall from grace and the final sad years of his career, until his death from cancer in 1979. In his later years, Ray enjoyed a small renaissance as his work was revived and celebrated by influential European critics.

Still, by most measures his great potential was never fully realized, and Ray himself admitted he was “the best damn filmmaker in the world who has never made one entirely good, entirely satisfactory film.” The convincing evidence offered in “Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director” seems to bear that out.

- Dennis King

Most movie fans are familiar with the American Film Institute’s Top 100 lists. In the last decade, the award-winning AFI series has designated top 100 entries in numerous cinema categories (from best movies to best laughs, quotes, stars, songs, heroes and villains and so on).

Such lists are always highly subjective, but they serve as excellent initiators for discussions, debates, disagreements and further explorations of movies and all their glories.

For film buffs interested in a more Eurocentric and idiosyncratic version of cinematic list making, the British Film Institute proves itself a game player when it comes to compiling top 100s.

MacMillan offers 15 books in its catalog featuring BFI Screen Guides. The paperback guides (which retail at about $20 each) offer recommendations in specialized areas of popular and international cinema and television. Each guide represents its author’s personal but broadly representative summary of 100 recommended film and TV titles, together with an introduction and short credits.

Here’s a sampling of the series’ titles:

“100 Film Musicals” by Jim Hillier and Douglas Pye. “While centered on the dominant Hollywood tradition, (this guide) includes films from countries that often tried to emulate the Hollywood style, like Britain and Germany, as well as from very different cultures like India, Egypt and Japan.”

“100 Westerns” by Edward Buscombe. “This (guide) considers the defining features of the Western and traces its main cycles, from the epic Westerns of the 1920s and singing cowboys of the 1930s to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s.”

“100 Silent Films” by Bryony Dixon. “This illuminating guide introduces a wide range of films of the silent period (1895–1930), including classics such as ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915), ‘The General’ (1926), ‘Metropolis’ (1927), ‘Sunrise’ (1927) and ‘Pandora’s Box’ (1928), alongside more unexpected choices, and represents major genres and directors of the period – Griffith, Keaton, Chaplin, Murnau, Sjöström, Dovzhenko and Eisenstein.”

“100 Documentary Films” by Jim Hillier and Barry Keith Grant. “This guide provides concise and authoritative entries on one hundred key non-fiction films, from the Lumière brothers and the beginnings of film history to the present day, including recent films such as ‘Bowling for Columbine’ and ‘March of the Penguins.’”

“100 British Documentaries” by Patrick Russell. “This guide ranges from the Victorian period to the present day. Alongside such classics as ‘Night Mail’ and ‘Touching the Void’ are documentaries that illustrate the many uses to which it has been put – from program-filler to political propaganda to classroom teaching aid – and the many styles and viewpoints it has embraced.”

“100 Film Noirs” by Jim Hillier and Alastair Phillips. “This guide provides an accessible, richly-illustrated introduction to 100 key noir films, from Hollywood classics such as ‘Double Indemnity’ to more recent titles such as ‘Sin City,’ as well as examples from Europe, Japan, India and Mexico, together with an editorial overview of the genre and its key debates.”

“100 European Horror Films” by Steven Jay Schneider. “This guide dissects classic films from directors and countries particularly noted for their horror production, as well as delving into sub-genres such as zombie, cannibal and vampire movies. The book also covers films by directors more commonly associated with art cinema, such as Bergman and Polanski.”

“100 American Independent Films” by Jason Wood. “This guide looks at one hundred of the most interesting and influential American independent films, featuring indie classics such as ‘Shadows,’ ‘Blood Simple’ and ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ with twenty-five brand new entries, including recent releases such as ‘Old Joy,’ ‘Junebug’ and ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know.’”

“100 Bollywood Films” by Rachel Dwyer. “Historically important films have been included along with certain cult movies and top box office successes, including ‘Mother India,’ the national epic of a peasant woman’s struggle against nature and society; ‘Sholay,’ a ‘curry western’ where the all-star cast sing and dance; ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya le jayenge,’ the greatest of the diaspora films in which two British Asians fall in love while vacationing in Europe before going to India; ‘Junglee,’ in which love transforms a savage who sings and dances like Elvis and creates a new youth culture; and ‘Pyaasa,’ portraying a romantic poet who suffers for his art in the material world.”

“100 Shakespeare Films” by Daniel Rosenthal. “From Oscar-winning British classics to Hollywood musicals and Westerns, from Soviet epics to Bollywood thrillers, Shakespeare has inspired an almost infinite variety of films. Spanning a century of cinema, from a silent short of ‘The Tempest’ (1907) to Kenneth Branagh’s ‘As You Like It’ (2006), this work includes a rich selection Shakespeare films.”

Other films in the series include “100 Modern Soundtracks,” “100 Anime,” “100 Videogames,” “100 Road Movies” and “100 Animated Feature Films.”

- Dennis King

Michael H. Price is one of those invaluable characters that thrive in the rarefied fringes of the film fan world. The Fort Worth author is a respected movie critic and film festival programmer, an opinionated raconteur, a genuinely intellectual film wonk and a colorful connoisseur of B-grade horror, science fiction and film noir.

In 1979, he teamed with the late George E. Turner, special-effects/storyboard artist, animator, movie historian and fellow devotee of subterranean film genres, to produce the encyclopedic book “Forgotten Horrors,” a groundbreaking compendium of weird, obscure and sadly lost low-budget horror films produced from 1929 to 1937. (It was reissued in an updated, definitive edition in 2009.)

In the years since Turner’s death in 1999, Price, who inherited his partner’s burgeoning research archive, has continued their shared obsession and, alone or with like-mined collaborators, produced four additional “Forgotten Horrors” volumes that explore specific eras of horror genre filmmaking.

The latest is “Forgotten Horrors Vol 5: The Atom Age” (CreateSpace, $30), which Price has co-authored with prolific Tulsa author John Wooley (“Shot in Oklahoma” and “Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares”) and film biographer Jan Alan Henderson.

The 324-page trade paperback surveys more than 100 obscure horror and sci-fi movies – good, bad, obscure, sadly forgotten, understandably ignored and just plain weird – that were produced between 1949 and 1954, at the height of the cold war nuclear scare when even mainstream Hollywood was turning out such paranoia classics as “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Packed with loads of grainy, black-and-white production stills and garish posters and lobby cards, the jam-packed book offers essential production information on each movie (including detailed crew credits and cast lists) along with pithy commentary from one or more of the authors.

It’s a great skim-and-scan book for idly curious horror fans, as well as an invaluable research source for more serious students of B movies and genre fiction.

Among the oddities featured from this era are Mikel Conrad’s “The Flying Saucer,” Edgar G. Ulmer’s “The Man from Planet X,” Ivan Tors’ “Office of Scientific Investigation” trilogy and William Cameron Menzies’ “Invaders from Mars” – all fairly well known among hardcore fans.

Odder still are such hard-to-categorize offerings as “She’s Too Mean for Me,” with Mantan Moreland contending with a wife so violent as to make him “think the ‘tomic bomb is a cap pistol,” “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla,” in which the famed horror icon plays second banana to a pair of Martin and Lewis comic wannabes (“A Horror Film That Will Stiffen You with Laughter,” the poster promises), and “Skipalong Rosenbloom,” in which boxer-turned-actor Maxie Rosenbloom pokes fun at the old Hopalong Cassidy westerns.

The roster of weirdness goes on and on, with titles such as “Omoo Omoo the Shark God,” “Superman & the Mole Men,” “The Twonky” and “The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters” sure to fire up any film buff’s imagination.

According to Price’s “Forgotten Horrors” blog, he and his co-authors are currently at work two more follow ups – “Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree” and “Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6,” which will advance the series from 1955 to about 1985. Price says he’s also planning soon to launch a “Forgotten Horrors” podcast.

- Dennis King

It seems an odd compliment to call the highly anticipated biography of actor, director, producer and philanthropist Robert Redford comprehensive but not particularly revealing.

But that seems to be the case with author Michael Feeney Callan’s “Robert Redford: The Biography” (Knopf, $28.95), a jam-packed 470-page tome that takes ample advantage of the subject’s full if skittish cooperation – drawing from Redford’s personal papers, journals, script notes and correspondence and hundreds of hours of taped interviews – but still leaves Redford the man feeling like an elusive, enigmatic figure.

Always a bit of a paradox – a glamorous, high-profile movie star who seems positively shy and reticent about publicity – Redford is certainly among his generation’s most iconic leading men, with era-defining roles in films such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Natural.” As an Oscar-winning director, he’s helmed such classy, signature works as “Ordinary People,” “Quiz Show” and “A River Runs Through It.”

Callan does a thorough job of setting the stage by telling us of Redford’s rough-and-tumble early life in Los Angeles, his “girl-crazy” teen years as a budding juvenile delinquent more interested in hot rods and Beat poetry than in school. But, typical of Redford, there’s a guarded quality to any personal insight that he reveals. Always a golden boy and budding sex symbol, Redford simply reveals to his biographer that he was “hungry for experience” in those young days.

There’s some passing and perfunctory information about his uneasy 27-year marriage to Lola Van Wagenen and their four children (one son died in infancy) and his “beyond friendship” link to co-star Natalie Wood (whom he appeared with in 1962’s “Inside Daisy Clover” and 1966’s “This Property Is Condemned”).

Also somewhat sketchy is the section covering Redford’s teaming of giants with Paul Newman on two film classics – 1969’s “Butch Cassidy …” and 1973’s “The Sting.” But beyond a few anecdotes – one about Newman saving Redford from a stalker on the set of “The Sting” – little of real substance is revealed about their off-screen friendship or the exciting chemistry they generated on-screen.

Still, Callan, a veteran Irish writer who has written biographies of Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Julie Christie and Richard Harris, has managed to cobble together the most insightful literary examination yet at the now 74-year-old Redford. That’s in part thanks to forthright revelations from the actor-director’s children and from colleagues such as director Sydney Pollack, a lifelong friend who collaborated with Redford on seven films, most notably 1975’s “Three Days of the Condor.”

In the end, there’s just enough compilation of facts and fresh insights to give us a clearer picture of the publicity-shy Redford – of his restless, anti-Hollywood lifestyle, of his dedicated eco-activism and political lobbying, of his powerful attachment to the Utah wilderness and his founding of the Sundance Institute and it’s game-changing film festival. The book’s not groundbreaking, but it is enough to confirm the widely held perspective that Robert Redford is, indeed, a decidedly uncommon movie star and a golden boy with a common touch.

- Dennis King

He was easygoing and charming on camera, but private and reserved off. He was born in Canada but became such an iconic figure on screen that fellow actor Sidney Poitier said of him, “He is a genuine American movie star.”

Glenn Ford might not have gained the lofty status and respect of such Hollywood titans as Clark Gable, James Stewart or Henry Fonda, but in a career that featured roles in such classics as “The Blackboard Jungle,” “Gilda,” “Jubal,” “The Big Heat,” “3:10 to Yuma” and “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” he certainly ranks among cinema’s most versatile, durable and endearing leading men.

Now Ford, one of the last old-school leading men of Hollywood’s defunct studio system, gets an intimate insider’s biography, “Glenn Ford: A Life” (University of Wisconsin Press, $24.95), written by the actor’s only child, Peter Ford.

Son of Glenn Ford and dancer Eleanor Powell, Peter Ford writes an expectedly celebratory account of his father’s eventful life and career. But this biography isn’t merely a PR job, as the writer offers up an honest and clear-eyed assessment of his father’s shortcomings, as well as his impressive career.

Drawing on the Ford family collection of diaries, letters, audiotapes, unpublished reminiscences and rare candid photographs – plus interviews with family, friends and professional colleagues – Peter Ford assembles a remarkably frank and revealing portrait of his father as a driven actor, an American patriot and military veteran, a loving family man and a mercurial Hollywood man about town.

While much of the book focuses on Ford’s 60-plus years in movies, his versatile array of roles from westerns to romantic comedies to hardboiled crime pictures and dramas, and his long marriage to tap-dance star Powell, the son doesn’t blink at revealing his father’s wild side and many infidelities.

At various times, Ford was linked to such leading ladies as Joan Crawford, Dinah Shore, Brigitte Bardot, Connie Stevens, Debbie Reynolds, Hope Lang and Judy Garland. The biographer gives special attention to his father’s romantic roundelay with an aggressive and somewhat predatory Bette Davis.

But Ford’s decades-long, on-and-off relationship with “Gilda” co-star Rita Hayworth gets the deepest attention from the author. Apparently, it was a serious, tumultuous and complex relationship that eventually drew the ire of other Hayworth paramours and mentors, including Orson Welles and Columbia’s tyrannical Harry Cohn.

Eventually, Ford would marry four times – his 16-year marriage to Peter’s mother lasting the longest – and his stormy marital record finally left him emotionally and financially bankrupt.

But in the book’s intimate recollections by scores of colleagues – co-stars including Poitier, Ernest Borgnine, Shirley Jones, James Whitmore, Carl Reiner and Angela Lansbury and directors Vincent Sherman, Delbert Mann and Richard Donner – we get a picture of a mercurial personality who was very different in private than he was in public.

It’s a fact that Glenn Ford himself acknowledged in a 1949 interview quoted in the biography, where he said, “We are all three people – the person we think we are, the person the world thinks we are and the person we really are.” Apparently, Ford packed a lot of living into his eventful life.

- Dennis King

Since the candid and revealing “Steven Spielberg: A Biography” was published in 1997 – causing a major re-evaluation of the filmmaker as more than a facile, boy-wonder entertainer – much of import has happened in the life and career of America’s most consistently successful and influential movie mogul.

Now there is a new edition of film historian Joseph McBride’s biography that adds four new chapters to a life story that obviously is still unfolding with new and innovative work.

“Steven Spielberg: A Biography” (second edition, University Press of Mississippi, $30) takes up where the earlier edition left off, chronicling the extremely productive years from 1997 to the present. In that period, Spielberg helped found his own movie studio, DreamWorks SKG, with partners Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, and directed an ambitious string of movies that includes “Amistad,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” “Minority Report,” “The Terminal” and “Munich.”

As McBride notes, Spielberg’s rise to eminence has had its ups and downs. Initially hailed as a wunderkind with early successes such as “Duel” and “Sugarland Express,” followed by blockbusters “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.” and the Indiana Jones movies, Spielberg was largely painted by critics as “a child-man … incapable of dealing with the darker side of life.”

That is, until, “Schindler’s List,” which changed his critical profile radically and positioned him as a truly important filmmaker building a body of work that was not only commercially lucrative but socially and artistically ambitious.

McBride, an associate professor in the cinema department at San Francisco State University, is author of several respected film books, including “Hawks on Hawks” and “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career.” Having devoted years of research to Spielberg’s life and career, and having conducted more than 300 interviews, he’s uniquely qualified to assess the filmmaker’s career from a solid critical footing.

Clearly it was the author’s challenge to find anyone in the movie business willing to publicly criticize Spielberg. Most of the filmmaker’s friends, relatives and colleagues declined to assist McBride. But while largely admiring his subject’s films, the biographer nonetheless casts a hard eye on several of Spielberg’s directing failures (such as “1941” and “Always”) and his spotty record in producing others’ films and TV series.

Much about Spielberg’s personality and person life remains clouded in myth (some of it cannily promoted by the filmmaker himself). But with thoroughly researched and insightful detailing of Spielberg’s nomadic childhood and contentious relationship with creative but difficult parents, plus thoughtful analysis of his works, McBride creates an entertaining and human-scale portrait of this modern movie giant that’s as engaging as any of his film epics.

- Dennis King

Most people would guess that an historical accounting of cinema shot in the Sooner State would just about fill a pamphlet, but John Wooley has filled a revelatory and richly readable 309-page book with facts about rolling film in red dirt country.

“Shot in Oklahoma: A Century of Sooner State Cinema” reveals a long record of movies filmed in the Land of the Red Man, dating as far back as 1904. That was the year inventor Thomas Edison himself, the American movie studio pioneer, sent a film crew to Oklahoma’s 101 Ranch near Ponca City, seeking to capture authentic Western atmosphere on celluloid.

Many people who’ve lived in Oklahoma for any significant length of time might recall that Francis Ford Coppola brought young unknown actors such as Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane to Tulsa to film “The Outsiders” and “Rumblefish” (both released in 1983), based on novels by Oklahoma author S.E. Hinton. They might also be aware that director Barry Levinson brought Cruise back to Oklahoma, along with Dustin Hoffman, to shoot scenes for the Oscar-winning “Rain Man” in 1988, and that the big-budget disaster movie “Twister” (1996), with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, was shot in Wakita, Guthrie and several other state locations. And that’s about all that most folks know.

Fascinating details

But meticulously researched details of many older and/or lesser-known features shot in the Sooner state make for fascinating and informative reading, especially for film buffs and movie trivia fans who live here.

The book’s cover, for example, is taken from a poster hawking a low-budget 1950 Western called “Rock Island Trail,” a Republic picture shot mostly in Hollywood, with some outdoor action scenes filmed along a stretch of abandoned railroad track near McAlester. Its star, Forrest Tucker, is pictured leaping from the front of a locomotive with a six-gun in his hand and a savage look on his face. Great cover. Enhances the book’s title perfectly.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans filmed 1946′s “Home in Oklahoma” around the Arbuckle Mountains, and Roy and Dale actually came back to the Sooner State and got married on a cattle ranch in the area the very next year.

I was intrigued that a Western project called “Osage,” starring, among others, Tulsa Western swing ace Johnnie Lee Wills and actress Noel Neill, who would later play Lois Lane on the first “Superman” TV series, was shot in part around Pawhuska, but never completed.

I was surprised to learn that parts of the wildcat oil boom drama “Tulsa” (1949), starring Robert Preston and Susan Hayward, were shot on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, and even a small bit of John Ford’s 1940 film version of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” — a book vehemently denounced by Sooner citizens and politicians alike for its depiction of Dust Bowl Okies — was quietly filmed around the Beckham County courthouse in Sayre.

Fun stuff from Wooley, one of the most prolific and popular of Oklahoma writers, a former Tulsa World entertainment writer, novelist and author of many music- and movie-related books and articles rooted in Okie culture. “Shot in Oklahoma” is published in paperback by the University of Oklahoma Press with a list price of $16.95.

— Gene Triplett

It is perhaps one of the most recognizable city landmarks in the world, right up there with the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building. The Hollywood sign, that behemoth of white block letters set in a hillside overlooking Sunset Boulevard, is instantly identifiable as a symbol of the hope, fantasy and glamour that is Southern California’s movie industry.

But it wasn’t always so. And how this looming structure – originally erected in 1923 to tout the real estate development Hollywoodland – came to be such a potent icon of movie dreams is examined with wit and historical acuity in “The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon” (Yale University Press, $24).

Author Leo Braudy, a USC English professor and highly regarded critic, brings both a scholar’s acumen and a movie fan’s enthusiasm to this short, pithy book that examines the sign’s checkered history, its myths and misconceptions and its larger place in the pop-culture landscape.

How the sign grew to become a distinct American landmark involves many parallels with the development of the movie industry. Braudy mixes in lots of social history, urban studies, architectural theory, movie business lore and film references to paint a compelling picture. At one time, he notes, the sign fell into neglect and disrepair and was saved by an unlikely group of supporters – including rock star Alice Cooper and publisher Hugh Hefner – who oversaw its restoration in the 1970s.

Braudy readily acknowledges that the Hollywood sign is less imposing as a physical structure than as a metaphorical emblem of all the dreams and fantasies that the movie world represents. “Its essence is almost entirely abstract,” he writes, “at once the quintessence and the mockery of the science of signs itself.”

In fact, the author notes, Hollywood is more a state of mind than a geographical spot on the map. Very few “Hollywood studios” are located in Hollywood city limits, he writes, with most to be found in Culver City or the San Fernando Valley.

While many popular myths have grown up around the Hollywood sign, Braudy examines them with a scholar’s healthy skepticism. He questions the veracity of the sign’s most famous suicide – that of Peg Entwistle, a supposedly failed actress, who was said to have walked for miles and scrambled across rough terrain in 1932 to climb the 50 feet to the top of the H and hurl herself off.

And he’s even more doubtful of the myth maintaining that filmmaker Mack Sennett, the land’s early owner, brought in some 500 pigs to kill off the rattlesnakes that still inhabit the area.

“The Hollywood Sign” is part of Yale University Press’ “Icons of America” — a series of brief works by scholars, critics and writers that also includes titles such as “The Hamburger: A History,” “The Liberty Bell,” “Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace” and “Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams.”

- Dennis King

Prolific Tulsa author John Wooley should limber up his autographing arm as two movie-related books he penned are coming to bookstores this spring.

On March 15, Wiley Publishing released Wooley’s new biography, “Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares.” On April 7, the University of Oklahoma Press will issue Wooley’s book, “Shot in Oklahoma: A Century of Sooner State Cinema.”

“Wes Craven” draws on Wooley’s interviews with the director and on exhaustive research to provide an absorbing portrait of the cult film director who gave us “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Scream” and other iconic horror films. In a career that has spanned nearly 40 years, Craven’s works, which often mounted masterly examinations of the nightmarish nexus of dreams and reality, have employed pithy themes cloaked in the conventions of populist horror fiction.

Wooley’s book provides fascinating behind-the-scenes stories about the director’s films, as well as keen critical analyses of the philosophical and psychological foundations for Craven’s body of work.

“Shot in Oklahoma” is billed as an engaging ride through Oklahoma’s untold cinema history. It ranges through a period when movie pioneer Thomas Edison shot westerns at Oklahoma’s 101 Ranch near Ponca City and advances through the era when Francis Ford Coppola came to Tulsa (with young actors such as Matt Dillon and Tom Cruise) to film “The Outsiders,” based on local author S.E. Hinton’s young adult novel. And along the way it touches on many high-profile Hollywood films that employed the Sooner state as soundstage – films as diverse as “Where the Red Fern Grows,” “Twister,” “UHF,” “Elizabethtown” and “Rain Man.”

Through in-depth research and interviews, the author also reveals unsung aspects of the state’s early all-black films shot in Oklahoma’s African American towns, films starring American Indian leads and low-budget slasher movies created in Oklahoma that transformed the home-video movie business worldwide.

Supported by vintage photographs and an in-depth filmography of more than one hundred movies shot in Oklahoma, the book serves as the first comprehensive survey of the Sooner state’s rich and colorful history as a thriving on-location film player.

John Wooley, formerly entertainment writer with the Tulsa World, has written, co-written or edited more than 20 books, including the recent novel, “Ghost Band,” and the nonfiction book “From the Blue Devils to Red Dirt: The Colors of Oklahoma Music.”

- Dennis King

The great crime novelist Raymond Chandler paid one Hollywood star the ultimate compliment when he observed that the actor could be “tough without a gun.”

That actor was the iconic man’s man of classic cinema, Humphrey Bogart, whose well-chronicled life on screen and off gets a polished (if not terribly revelatory) replay in the new biography, “Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart“ (Knopf, $26.95), by critic Stefan Kanfer.

Kanfer, whose credits include reliable biographies of Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx and Lucille Ball, doesn’t really uncover any startling new discoveries about Bogart’s storied life and career (the actor has been thoroughly examined in several bios, especially a fine 1997 book by A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax, and in revealing memoirs by wife Lauren Bacall and son Stephen).

So while there’s not much that’s new in Kanfer’s slick 304-page volume, the author does provide a solid overview of Bogie’s rebellious youth, his long apprenticeship as a tough-guy supporting player in studio programmers, his breakthrough and string of classic roles in films such as “Casablanca,” “To Have and Have Not,” “The Big Sleep,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The African Queen” and his eventual rise to mythic status.

All the touchstones of Bogart’s life are here, with Kanfer neatly highlighting some facts that might not have been underscored in other books. For instance, after an upper-class New York upbringing and rebellious private-school education, Bogart wandered to Hollywood and entrée to a middling early acting career.

His early resume is heavy with forgettable supporting roles and a succession of gangster parts. Kanfer notes that by one account, Bogie’s first 45 movies saw him going to the gallows or the electric chair eight times, sentenced to life in the pen nine times and cut down in a hail of bullets some 12 times.

Eventually, after assuming two landmark roles that were turned down by George Raft (“High Sierra” and “The Maltese Falcon”), Bogart fine-tuned his craft, carved out a distinctive screen persona and emerged as an iconic figure who transcended Hollywood stardom and rose to mythical status in popular culture.

He was the ultimate man’s man – a guy who could look good in a trench coat or tux or week-old stubble or shabby clothes. He was a straight shooter, a man of few words, a no-fuss actor, a romantic with a steely spine and a stand-up guy.

Even half a century after his death (he died at age 57 in 1957 of cancer), Bogart’s influence on actors and on film culture is as powerful as ever. Though he was not conventionally handsome and he struggled with a mild speech impediment, Humphrey Bogart is an enduring star and a figure of endless fascination. Hence, a new biography that goes where others have gone before that is still a great pleasure to read.

As Kanfer writes of Bogart and his signature performance in “Casablanca”:

“There was no other player who could have so credibly inhabited the role of Rick Blaine, expatriate, misanthrope, habitual drinker, and, ultimately, the most self-sacrificing, most romantic Hollywood hero of the war years. To watch him in this extraordinary feature was not only to see a character rise to the occasion. It was to see a performer mature, to become the kind of man American males yearned to be.”

And still yearn to be. “Tough Without a Gun.”

- Dennis King