Ss44 Skyscraper 44

For more than 50 years, the Moscow Skyscraper, this “unsinkable Titanic”, has been a metaphor for Russia and its vast people. It was after the victory over Nazi Germany that Stalin launched the project of the Skyscraper.

Whether tall office buildings, high-rise apartments, or lofty hotels, skyscrapers have been stars in American cinema since the silent era. Cinema’s tall buildings have been variously represented as unbridled aspiration, dens of iniquity and eroticism, beacons of democracy, and well-oiled corporate machines. Considering their intriguing diversity, Merrill Schleier establishes and explains the impact of actual skyscrapers on America’s ideologies about work, leisure, romance, sexual identity, and politics as seen in Hollywood movies.
Schleier analyzes cinematic works in which skyscrapers are an integral component, interpreting the iconography and spatial practices in these often fictional modern buildings, especially on concepts of gender. Organized chronologically and thematically, she offers close readings of films including Safety Last, Skyscraper Souls, Wife vs. Secretary, Baby Face, The Fountainhead, and Desk Set. Opening with the humorous antics of Harold Lloyd, the premier skyscraper filmmaker of the silent era, the book moves through the disillusionment of the Depression era, in which skyscrapers are employed as players in moralistic, class-conscious stories, to post–World War II and its reimagining of American political and economic values and ends with the complicated prosperity of the 1950s and the lives of white-collar workers and their spouses.

Geoff Downes is the keyboardist in The Buggles, ASIA and YES. Geoff Downes co-wrote the hits 'VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR' and 'HEAT OF THE MOMENT'.

Find the evidence to convict a criminal in Master Thief - Skyscraper Sting, an exhilarating caper that gives payback a new name. Master criminal Samuel Hawthorne is about to escape justice, but one woman from his past is determined to make him pay for his crimes. Master Thief Robin Fleet, trained then betrayed by Hawthorne, is using her skills to find the evidence needed to convict him. With only one night to uncover his secrets however, she will have to use every trick in the book to stop him!