James Harvey

James Harvey was born on 10 August 1929 in Chicago, the son of Howard Malcolm and Loretta Hughes Harvey. He died on 15 May 2020 in New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center of myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare cancer of the blood. Jim received his BA from Loyola University (Chicago) in 1951 and his MA from the University of Michigan in 1954, where he won the Hopwood Prize. He began a career as a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana from 1954 to 1955. Then, after serving in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957, he moved to New York. He taught first at St. John's University from 1957 to 1960 and then at the State University of New York/Stony Brook from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. He also taught film at the New School, at the University of California/Berkeley, and at Sarah Lawrence. He began his writing career as a playwright; one play, Dissenters, was performed at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven in 1974. He then turned to writing about film with great success. His first book, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges, was published by Knopf in 1987 and his second, Movie Love in the Fifties, was published, again by Knopf, in 2001. His final book, Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014. He also published numerous essays and reviews. Jim leaves no relatives and many friends. His estate goes to charities. Jim's photograph was copyrighted by Nancy Crampton in 2014 and can be used only with permission. It appeared on the dust jacket of Watching Them Be in 2014. The New York Times published Jim's obituary on Thursday, 11 June. The link is https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/movies/james-harvey-film-author-dead.html. An authority on the career and films of Ernst Lubitsch, in January 2018 Jim was the honored guest speaker at a conference, Lubitch in Berlin. Jim's two appearances, his talk on Friday and the concluding panel, can be seen on YouTube. The links are 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPuWvhj5Q3s&feature=youtu.be and 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSbvUBfFC1k. J. C. Gabel interviewed Jim about Watching Them Be. The link is https://thedissolve.com/features/interview/689-film-scholar-james-harvey-talks-about-watching-the/. His friend Phillip Lopate has an account of Jim as a film critic in IndieWire. The link is https://www.indiewire.com/2020/05/james-harvey-dies-kael-sarris-film-critic-generation-1202234248.