Magic and Myth of the Movies  

"As a reader I am peculiarly, indeed fatally, attracted to the special kind of critical daring practiced by Parker Tyler in The Hollywood Hallucination and Magic and Myth of the Movies. This daring consists of two major elements: a willingness to risk overinterpretation of specific objects (the popular films and film stars that catch his endlessly roving eye) and the courage to build on these fragile and transitory creations a towering theoretical structure (a structure from which, it should be added, one can gain a unique view of the way one of our most significant cultural institutions actually works—or used to work at the height of its powers—on us)."Richard Schickel in the opening lines to The Hollywood Hallucination (1944) by Parker Tyler