The long, colorful career of Walter Wanger (1894-1968) is one of Hollywood's greatest untold stories. Married to actress Joan Bennett, he is perhaps best remembered for shooting her lover in a Beverly Hills parking lot and for his later involvement with the catastrophic Cleopatra. But Wanger was an intellectual sophisticate and a socially conscious movie executive who produced provocative message movies and glittering romantic melodramas.

His career started at the powerful Paramount studio in the 1920s, and in subsequent decades Wanger worked at virtually every major studio as either a contract producer or an independent. He produced a spate of American film classics, including Queen Christina with Greta Garbo, John Ford's Stagecoach, Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

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Wanger's influence and his astute skills as a producer have received remarkably little attention, and, as Matthew Bernstein demonstrates in this insightful and engaging biography, the producer's life was fraught with contradictions and conflicts. A Dartmouth graduate, he rose to prominence at a time when articulate, college-educated producers were unknown. Although he touted the social value of the cinema, most of his own sixty-five films were markedly devoid of such value.

And despite his surface appearance as a self-righteous rebel who railed at the strictures of the system, Wanger was fundamentally a satisfied representative of the American film industry.