March Books
It’s been seven weeks since the last roundup on new and noteworthy titles, so we’ve got more than a few to catch up with, ranging from coffee table books to biographies to critical studies.
Directors’ Arts
Mark Cousins’s documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a reevaluation of the director’s work as a graphic artist, will soon arrive in theaters. In the meantime, Cousins has written the foreword to Orson Welles Portfolio: Sketches and Drawings from the Welles Estate, a collection that, as Dalya Alberge notes in the Guardian, also includes illustrations of set designs and costumes for unrealized projects. Author Simon Braund, who’s worked on the book with Welles’s daughter Beatrice, estimates that around three quarters of these drawings have never been published before. At Wellesnet, Ray Kelly talks with Braund and Beatrice Welles about a few of their favorites. “The illustrations for the edition of Paris Vogue he guest edited in the early ’80s are terrific,” says Braund, adding that they’re “full of mischief and merciless self-parody. The set designs and costume sketches are also fascinating, particularly those for Chimes at Midnight. They’re typically economical but extremely vivid and action-packed.” You can have a look at a dozen or so drawings from the book at Flavorwire.
At Slant, Chuck Bowen notes that there’s currently an ongoing effort to “recalibrate” the position of David Lynch in popular culture. “The documentary David Lynch: The Art Life featured hypnotic footage of Lynch in the studio of his Los Angeles home, smoking and creating new canvases,” he writes. “Last year, the book David Lynch: Nudes collected his empathetic, erotic, and astonishingly subjective photography of nude women. Now there’s David Lynch: Someone Is in My House, a gorgeous volume of Lynch’s painting, photography, sculpture, and short-film stills.”
Excerpts
The Guardian’s Peter Conrad argues David Thomson’s criticism remains “the most ingenious and imaginative writing about film.” Of the over twenty books Thomson has written, the one he’s best known for is his Biographical Dictionary of Film, which reappears every few years in a new and expanded edition. Thomson’s latest, Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire, is “a strange and scrambled history of sex onscreen,” finds Annalisa Quinn in the Washington Post. Daphne Merkin, reviewing the book for the New York Times, suggests that it’s “an argument—or several arguments—wrapped in a film history wrapped in a memoir . . . Whether the book works as a whole (I’m not sure it does) seems to me less important than the parts that sum it up, which in Thomson’s case contain more original insights, provocative asides and thought-inducing speculations than several volumes of a less talented writer’s efforts.” In an excerpt at Literary Hub, Thomson proposes that Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), with Burt Lancaster as a gossip columnist and Tony Curtis as a press agent, “might have been a greater film still if it could have seen or admitted that their mutual loathing is the only thing that keeps them from being lovers.”
Geoff Dyer has followed up on his 2012 book Zona, both a close reading of and an extended riff on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), with Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, a scene-by-scene breakdown of Brian G. Hutton’s Where Eagles Dare (1968). In an excerpt at Literary Hub, Dyer writes that the World War II movie starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton “still seems, fifty years after its first release, to contain some essence of what cinema means to me now, when action movies have become a form of explosive torpor.”
Longreads has posted a generous excerpt from The Golden West: Hollywood Stories, a 2005 collection of writing by Daniel Fuchs, a novelist who moved out west in 1937 to write or simply spruce up screenplays. Fuchs argues that the great directors of the golden age “were a gaudy company, rambunctious and engrossed. What they produced, roistering along in those sun-filled, sparkling days, was a phenomenon, teeming with vitality and ardor, as indigenous as our cars or skyscrapers or highways, and as irrefutable. Generations to come, looking back over the years, are bound to find that the best, most solid creative effort of our decades was spent in the movies, and it’s time someone came clean and said so.”
Flavorwire has put up a brief excerpt from Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood in which Karina Longworth writes about the romance between “kindred spirits” Hughes and Katharine Hepburn. Seduction is one of eleven books that Pamela Hutchinson writes about—and recommends—at Silent London.
Hollywood Lives
This Friday and Saturday, Victoria Riskin will be at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles to present her new book about her parents, Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive will be screening a series of films dedicated to the famed star of King Kong (1933) and the screenwriter known for his work with Frank Capra. While that series runs every weekend through the end of March, New York’s Film Forum will present an even more robust series from March 15 through April 2. “Researching and writing this book has given Victoria Riskin—and her readers—two related pleasures,” writes Dennis Drabelle in the Washington Post, namely, “getting to know the man who championed the little guy on film and remembering the woman who screamed life into a Fay Wray doll.”
In her portrait of the man Pauline Kael called “the greatest American screenwriter,” Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, Adina Hoffman “expertly links Hollywood and New York, American Jewish conundrums and the intricacies of Zionist politics,” writes David Denby in the New Yorker. “Immersing herself in Hecht’s novels and tracts (no easy task), she writes with enormous flair about a marginal figure in literature but a major influence on twentieth-century popular culture.”
Writing for Bright Lights Film Journal, Nell Beram considers a fateful turn in the career of Betty Garrett, the actress who appeared in such MGM musicals as On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, both from 1949, but lost the lead role in Annie Get Your Gun the following year to Betty Hutton. Beram compares the versions of the episode that appear in Farley Granger’s 2007 memoir Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway and the actress’s own Betty Garrett and Other Songs from 1998.
If Peter Shelley has “a fix on Gene Hackman’s true nature, he’s not telling,” writes Louis J. Wasser for Film International. “As readers of Gene Hackman: The Life and Work, we’re left to connect the dots the biographer has made available to us.” And for Tony Williams, also writing for Film International, Stone Wallace’s George Raft: The Man Who Would be Bogart is “a welcome addition to material on this actor’s life and cinematic status.”
