Before his recent retirement, Colin Crisp was Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, which he joined when it first opened in 1975, and where he served as Chairman and Dean of Humanities, and later as Acting Provost and Director of the Queensland College of Art. He has published a number of books on the French cinema, and notably The Classic French Cinema 1930-1960, which the present work supplements by its consideration of genre and myth in the first decade of the French sound cinema.