June Books

MacMahon appeared in two dozen shows on Broadway and in more than fifty films throughout her long career, and she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in Jack Conway and Harold S. Bucquet’s Dragon Seed (1944). Filler knew her well, and when they met, she became a sort of stand-in for the grandmother he’d recently lost and dearly missed. In the early 1920s, just prior to the arrival of the Moscow Art Theatre in New York, the first stop on a legendary tour, MacMahon was one of ten actors selected to study Konstantin Stanislavski’s “system,” the approach to performance that would come to be known as the Method.

“However much I loved her,” writes Filler in the New York Review of Books, “it seems a considerable stretch for Stangeland to posit MacMahon as the mother of Method acting in America.” But he still recommends the book. “Stangeland’s well-deserved reconsideration of this regrettably underappreciated figure closes a lacuna in the literature of film culture that has always disturbed me, given the surfeit of books about actors of lesser merit.”

Meantime, in an excerpt up at the New Yorker from his memoir The Star Dressing Room: Portrait of an Actor, Alan Shayne recalls being repeatedly upstaged by a fellow student in an acting class taught by Stella Adler, whose interpretation of the Method differed radically from that of Lee Strasberg, the director of the Actors Studio. The upstart student who kept stealing the limelight was Marlon Brando.

These monthly roundups on new and noteworthy titles are usually cascades of praise, but on occasion, it seems right to pass along a fair warning. Writing for Cineaste, Darragh O’Donoghue dismisses Joseph Harriss’s Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France as “a glorified Wikipedia article. One that is shaky with facts; packed with quotes from books quoted in other books, rather than the books themselves; and spoiled by the author’s dislike of leftist politics, the Nouvelle Vague, and the French in general. One that comes no nearer to the source of big-nosed, thin-lipped, surly Jean Gabin’s popular appeal or mythic resonance.”

Anthony Uzarowski seems to have thoroughly enjoyed researching his new book, Jessica Lange: An Adventurer’s Heart. “From the disappearing world of flamenco-dancing Gypsies in Andalusia to the unrest of Paris in 1968, to the excitement of Swinging London and the artistic communes of Amsterdam, Lange’s early years read like a kaleidoscope of psychedelic tripping,” he writes at Air Mail. “And it gets only more interesting from there—studying mime with an old master in Paris, mingling with the likes of Grace Jones, Antonio Lopez, Andy Warhol, and Robert Frank in New York—and all that long before she was ever cast in her first movie.”

You won’t find much about acting in the excerpt at Retreats from Oblivion from Burt Kearns’s Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy, but if you think you might enjoy a well-told account of the night in 1958 when Tierney and a construction worker, both falling-down drunk, exchanged blows with a couple of uniformed cops on the streets of New York, you’re probably right.

Theater critic John Lahr is the author of Notes on a Cowardly Lion, a biography of his father, Bert Lahr, who most famously appeared in The Wizard of Oz (1939), as well as books on Joe Orton, Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. Writing for the London Review of Books, Lahr tackles Hollywood: The Oral History, a compendium gleaned by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson from tens of thousands of hours of conversations stored in the archives of the American Film Institute.

“You can call this selective cut and paste job a ‘collage’; you can call it a ‘mosaic’; you can call it ‘découpage’; but you can’t call it ‘history,’” writes Lahr. Nevertheless, the book “yields some rewarding deep-dishing: Mae West (‘When she’d get mad she would hum all the time, like a rattlesnake before it strikes’); Jerry Lewis (‘He did all the talking; the only thing that would stop Jerry Lewis was an elephant gun’); Margaret Dumont (‘She was absolutely bald. She wore a wig which Harpo used to steal’); Bette Davis on Errol Flynn (‘I just sat there and closed my eyes and pretended it was Olivier’).”

Sammy Harkham, who won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel in 2012 for Everything Together, spent fourteen years creating Blood of the Virgin, the story of an editor working at a studio that cranks out exploitation flicks at the peak of the grindhouse era. “Particularly intriguing to me,” writes Carolina A. Miranda in the Los Angeles Times, “is the way Harkham, who was born and raised principally in Los Angeles, captures the city’s shabby 1970s profile—in color, but mainly in monochromatic black, white and brown.” Blood of the Virgin “shows Harkham settled into a style all his own and an expert sense of pacing. Pithy chatter among a multitude of characters occupies a dense grid, but a dream sequence is more loosely rendered, dispensing with the traditional black borders between images.”

Maureen Ryan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and her new book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood—Vanity Fair has an excerpt—is “a Howard Beale-style, ‘mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore’ manifesto directed at the overlords and ladies of show business, complete with a multi-point plan for their redemption,” writes Alexandra Jacobs in the New York Times. But Jordan Riefe, writing for the Los Angeles Times, has reservations about the ways Ryan maps out the problems plaguing the industry and about the potential effectiveness of the solutions she proposes.

In his essay collection The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men, Manuel Betancourt “employs a wide-ranging mélange of associated texts to paint a broad picture of how what we look at can determine what we become,” writes Richard Scott Larson at Slant. “Incisive without being too academic about the scholarly theory undergirding his subject, he draws connections that feel both organic and surprising as he guides readers through his pantheon of influences and demonstrates how cultural production inevitably creates space for fantasy and desire to take new forms.”

Betancourt’s title overtly refers to “the male gaze,” a way of depicting women in art that Laura Mulvey examined in her landmark 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Edited by Oliver Fuke, The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretations collects the screenplays for the six films that the two theorists made together as well as analytical essays and other supplementary material. Introducing his interview in Film Quarterly with Mulvey and Fuke—Wollen, best known for his 1969 book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, passed away in 2019—Bruno Guaraná suggests that these films “manifest” a “push for a countercinema that does away with the binding pleasures and coercive gaze of mainstream cinema.”

In his nonlinear memoir, Pageboy,Elliot Page (Juno, Inception) recalls asking his mother if he could be a boy. He was six. It’s in the “tortured, contradictory internal monologue—familiar to other trans people as we contemplate what seems to be an extraordinary, unimaginable truth—that Pageboy is most powerful,” writes Gina Chua in the New York Times. “Page doesn’t really delve into questions of masculinity, or what it means to be a man, but he brings to life the visceral sense of gender dysphoria, or at least one type of dysphoria: the sense that your body is betraying you.”

Barbara Creed’s 1993 book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis was “ground-breaking” in that it “helped bring a more nuanced and psychoanalytic understanding of horror to film studies,” writes Holly Willis in Senses of Cinema. Creed’s Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, published last year, is one of several new volumes under review in Willis’s piece. “Each of these attends not only to women in film, but to women as makers of films.”

Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, the first book by Pop Culture Happy Hour cohost Aisha Harris, is “a blend of memoir and cultural analysis,” writes Elamin Abdelmahmoud in the New York Times. “Harris flaunts a wide range of references, moving easily between decades and arenas. She makes smart use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisits Key & Peele sketches, and dissects bell hooks’s analysis of the experimental film hero Stan Brakhage. The book is especially effective when its author leans on her personal experience.”

In Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies, Matthew Strohl, who teaches philosophy at the University of Montana, argues that “we can make a distinction between Bad Movie Ridicule and Bad Movie Love,” writes Sam Woolfe in Senses of Cinema. “The former is a posture of mockery, disdain, and schadenfreude.” Bad Movie Love is “superior because it can foster ‘valuable activities of engagement’ . . . Good-bad movies can open you up to aesthetic novelty, surrealism, and absurdity, in ways that conventionally good movies don’t.”

At one point in his piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books on Godfrey Cheshire’s In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema,Abe Silberstein singles out “the book’s most perceptive essay . . . To those who have judged Kiarostami’s work to be overrated or tedious, Cheshire implores them to ‘realize that the order in which you approach the films is crucial to how you understand them. Above all, view the Koker Trilogy in sequence, as a basis for watching the other films.’ To the enthusiasts, he implores they go beyond placing Kiarostami within the context of Great International Auteurs and instead locate his work within Persian literary culture—in other words, to momentarily resist the urge to universalize the director’s work.”

On the New Books Network, Kaveh Rafie talks with Monika Raesch about the collection she’s edited, Abbas Kiarostami: Interviews. Some of these conversations appear in English for the first time, and the volume also gathers lectures and other relevant material.

Recent guests on John Bleasdale’s Writers on Film podcast include Kyle Turner, the author of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Great Films the tell LGBTQIA+ Stories, and Jim Colvill, the editor of The Press Gang: Writings on Cinema from New York Press, 1991–2011. Colvill is also a cofounder of Film Desk Books, the small press and online bookseller whose recent titles include Jean Cocteau’s Diary of a Film and Ashley Clark’s Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.

Film Desk’s other cofounder, Jake Perlin, has edited DO NOT DETONATE Without Presidential Approval: A Portfolio on the Subjects of Mid-century Cinema, the Broadway Stage and the American West. The collection gathers new and classic essays that inform Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.

Knopf has picked up North American rights to a memoir that Noah Baumbach is planning to write, and in a sense, the filmmaker has already given us fictionalized previews of two potential chapters. The Squid and the Whale (2005) draws on the divorce of his parents, novelist Jonathan Baumbach and film critic Georgia Brown, and Marriage Story (2019) is loosely based on his breakup with Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Michael Caine has also been working on a book, Deadly Game, his first novel. A London detective’s search for stolen uranium has him bumping into neo-Nazis, drug lords, and a Russian oligarch in the thriller that will be out in November.

Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past, a collection edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and featuring contributions from Erika Balsom, Arsenal Cinema cofounder Ulrich Gregor, Volker Pantenburg, and Girish Shambu, is now freely accessible online. The volume is part of the Arsenal’s Archival Assembly project that also includes the exhibition How to know what’s really happening, which is still on view through July 2 at silent green in Berlin.

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody sketches an outline of the fascinating life of Helen Scott, “the American film publicist, then translator, best known as François Truffaut’s collaborator on his book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock. Her extraordinary, lifelong range of activities, in and out of movies, is matched by her literary depth of character.” Brody draws from L’amie Américaine, Serge Toubiana’s 2020 biography, and Mon petit Truffe, ma grande Scottie, a collection of Scott and Truffaut’s letters edited by Toubiana and published in May. Neither book has yet appeared in English.

Christopher Schobert’s latest roundup at the Film Stage features a special section on novels, some of them slated for adaptation and others that simply make for fun summertime reading. ”I’m very excited for the eventual Amazon series based on Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, a weird, wild, Yale-set story of secret societies,” writes Schobert, “and the recently released second book in the series, Hell Bent, is just as satisfying as the first.” And Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry is “a winning bit of historical fiction about a female scientist in the 1960s; an Apple TV+ series starring Brie Larson is on the way. You won’t find a more purely enjoyable novel on this list.”