books about cinema

co-sign Robin Wood's book

That Harris book was so good it kicked off my ILE Oscar year polls.

The book that kicked it all off for me was the 1981 edition of Movies on TV by Steven H. Scheuer. Our family got it as a gift for donating to the Buffalo PBS station. The writing is just capsule reviews, terse but very evocative, and almost certainly this is the first place I heard of Godard, Buñuel, Robert Kramer, Brakhage etc. (apparently, someone thought that The Art of Vision was likely to be broadcast on TV in 1981, there's a review of it in here). To save space, movies that received less than two stars out of four had no review, but even that ignited my curiousity: "The Last Movie? One star? How bad can it be?"

I had at least one copy of Scheuer's guide. He was Maltin's rival for a while before dropping out--many more eccentric entries than Maltin.

Just ordered a copy of Murderous Passions based on the recommendations here. Looks fun. Also picked up "Have You Seen" for three quid in the local Oxfam and looking forward to depositing on the toilet shelf.

I've had the Lee Server book on the shelf for 20 years since the paperback came out, it's worth reading? Was put off by the bulk, and the suspicion that it was one of those flip post-Swingers bios like Rat Pack Confidential.

RIP Lee Server. As stated above, the Mitchum bio is one of my all-time faves. Dunno about flip - it doesn't do too much hand wringing about its subject's bad behaviour but doesn't glorify it either. I did finish it liking him less than before, his 60's right wing turn and contempt for his own profession got a bit tiring. Crazy anecdote after crazy anecdote, though, just off memory:

-Mitchum's early life including a stint on a chain gang and writing a sympathetic play about a union leader.

-Mitchum sharing a spliff w/ a younger actor in a hotel room while listening to Sgt.Pepper. Said young actor starts to try to explain the yoof to him, Mitchum just smiles going "I know, man"; "can't believe I was enough of an idiot to try to lecture ROBERT MITCHUM on hipness"

-Mitchum's encounter with a trans belly dancer; when warned off her he replies "I don't care what's in her pants man, she's hot!" - equally gross and progressive, I guess?

-As mentioned above: Aldrich and Mitchum working on some b movie, Aldrich going into full creative crisis and Mitchum telling him "don't you understand what we're doing here? We're doing a gorilla movie. People watch them to see me beat up some thugs and get the girl. That's all this is." Aldrich replies in sadness "I don't want to make gorilla movies", and Mitchum just kinda shrugs.

Also some really great turns of phrase like describing a Mitchum/Dean Martin film as a "summit of indifference".

Server also contributed to the super fun Big Book Of Noir, and he has a book called Asian Pop Cinema which is worth tracking down - pretty cool that even in 1999 he managed to include South Korea, the Philipines and Taiwan cinema.

Oh, did he pass? RIP. The Mitchum book and the Ava Gardner one are both grebt as is The Big Book of Noir.

I remember the punchline of one story as "I don't care about plumbing!"

Also, two anecdotes you overlooked are the one about the bumping landing before shooting Out of the Past when he said "Anybody got any gage?" and the one where he got to LA first because his brother got arrested by a railroad bull. When his rother finally arrives, Bob is in the tub taking a bubble bath, smoking a cigar, reading Hollywood Confidential and says "What kept you?"

bumpy

brother

More than bumpy, no brakes. Plane knocked over an outhouse. Two men were out cold.

Finished David Thomson's How to Watch a Movie. Really liked it--the title's a come-on, it just wanders around and doesn't really try to guide you about anything (thankfully), and even though I wasn't always sure what point Thomson was trying to make at any given moment, I liked the mix of personal anecdote and unanswerable (meta-) questions, and the mix of films suited me fine.

I wonder if he's got ghost writers or grad students. No way this guy has been so prolific the last three years. No detracting from quality: I read Sleeping With Strangers in 2020 and shared excerpts with students then.

Three books in three years, 200-300 pages each, two published during a pandemic, doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. Some people rhyme slow, some people rhyme quick.

Also, the way David Thomson watches a movie is to frenziedly masturbate every time Nicole Kidman appears on screen, and you probably don't need a whole book telling you how to do that.

I love my DT books but this is v true

there's a good bit in a rosenbaum review of the dyer stalker and mars-jones ozu books where he is taken aback that both writers seem to regard thomson as an unquestionable expert

That's because both of them don't know much about film and are weak critics but were indulged by their publishers.

Dyer's Stalker book works because he isn't a film critic.