Review by New York Times Review
WHO QUALIFIES AS an icon? What deserves to be called iconic? In matters of Hollywood, a designation that originally pertained to religious imagery is now regularly applied to subjects as secular as "Animal House," Sandra Bullock, "Vertigo," W.C. Fields and that scene in the original "Friday the 13th" where Kevin Bacon is stabbed through the neck with an arrow. One army of admirers may think the title ought to go to "This Is Spinal Tap" ; for a different platoon, Judy Garland deserves the title for life. That's why, years ago, the top editor at the magazine where I wrote about movies banned the word "icon" from its pages. More often than not, he said, the writer just means, I think so-and-so is cool. Let me tell you why and how. By way of saying, let me tell you why and how the implications of iconography - or its provocative opposite, iconoclasm - shape each of six books on a theme of Hollywood that arrive in the season of heat, superheroes and blockbuster-size declarations of pop-cultural opinion. I have ALFRED HITCHCOCK: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $20) to thank for providing focus. More specifically, I salute the branding savvy of the publishers, who have packaged this small, engaging, intellectually agile study by the cultural scholar and author Michael Wood in a roster marketed as the Icons Series. Others who have gotten the nod include Edgar Allan Poe, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Stalin and Jesus. A whole bookshop, preferably booby-trapped, could be stocked with all the volumes written (saving shelf space for those yet to come) about Hitchcock, whose exquisite understanding of suspense defined his filmmaking career. (In a Hitchcockian world, we who were outside the shop would know of the traps, but the innocent book buyer who happened to enter would not, so that we could roil with pleasurable anxiety until the wrong thing happened to the wrong man.) Wood relies on a reader to know the basics about the director: his Britishness, which he clung to through his years in Hollywood; his famous movies; his close creative collaboration with his wife, Alma Reville; and even his rotund and dour physical profile. And with the confidence that he is among well-read friends, the author - a fellow Englishman transposed to America, and a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton - wanders at a lively pace through intriguing and subtle observations about this great artist, "a frightened man who got his fears to work for him on film." Developing the subtitle of his study, Wood proposes that "in Hitchcock's films, it seems, there are only three options: to know too little, to know too much (however little that is), and to know a whole lot that is entirely plausible and completely wrong." The author, by the way, never whispers the word "icon." Nor does he ever refer to his subject as "Hitch." For that kind of familiarity and self-confidence in all opinions, try KEEPERS (Knopf, $26.95), by Richard Schickel. "I came to know Hitch in his later years, and I am here to testify that no man ever took movies more seriously than he did," Schickel writes - not entirely a compliment. This redoubtable movie critic and historian began reviewing films in 1965, and served as a film critic for Time and Life magazines for 44 years; he calculates that he has seen some 22,590 movies in his 82 years. He has full rights to subtitle his 38th book "The Greatest Films - and Personal Favorites - of a Moviegoing Lifetime." In "Keepers," Schickel thumbs through his notes and comes to a conclusion. "The truth, very simply, is that most movies are lousy or, at best, routine," he declares with characteristic bluntness. (The cumulative footage of 22,590 movies can do that to a fellow.) His plan, therefore, is to linger on movies that have given him pleasure over the decades, domestic productions for the most part, because "movies being movies, they exist, first and foremost, to entertain - especially those made in America." Although he doesn't label them as such, Schickel's personal lists of icons and (even more interesting) false idols are easy for a reader to assemble. Fun, too: With his assertively chatty, you-and-me-pal narrative style and his "Frank Capra told me this, Bette Davis told me that" connections in the business, the veteran takes on all comers. His favorite golden-age movie star? Errol Flynn. The 1939 French masterwork "The Rules of the Game"? "I still don't get it." His favorite movie? "Fargo." And for good measure, the word on the influential film critic Pauline Kael? "Basically a bully, and a relentless one when she sensed weakness. Her trick was to pretend she was telling the brutal truth, which everyone else was too cowardly to do." Raise 'em up, knock 'em down, pilgrim ! Schickel's declarations are models of gravitas compared with the pronouncements flung with aggressive bro swagger by Adam Rockoff in the horror of it all: One Moviegoer's Love Affair With Masked Maniacs, Frightened Virgins, and the Living Dead ... (Scribner, $24). The author is a passionate fan of the horror genre in all its forms, the bloodier and more gruesome the better. To him, the whole genre is iconic! Previously, Rockoff wrote "Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986"; he also wrote an adaptation of the exploitation film "I Spit on Your Grave." He really really really loves the stuff, and has since he was a kid. He is a proud "fear junkie," and a connoisseur exacting enough to specify that Tom Savini's "makeup effects in 'Friday the 13th' are iconic." For good measure, he frequently reminds readers that he is also a solid citizen, i.e., married, with two small children. He dedicates his book to Grandma Gladys. This is a good place for me to disclose that I do not like horror movies. I hate slasher pics. I am a confirmed gore sissy. And that's O.K. We do not share the same tastes, but I am genuinely interested in hearing about the fine points of Rockoff's fervor. Except that the man won't stop shrieking with disdain, middle finger raised at those who are not members of his clubhouse. "The Horror of It All" twitches with manic, foulmouthed, bloggy energy about the pleasures of getting "freaked ... the [expletive] out." Rockoff revels in his list of slasherdom's "greatest kills." He is prone to the one-upmanship of negative compliments: Gary Sherman is one of the horror genre's "most underrated directors"; "Event Horizon" is "a criminally underrated film." But I can tolerate the fanboy grammar. In my business, I'm used to it. What wears this sissy out, though, are the trollish provocations spouted in the name of iconoclasm. Rockoff hates film critics - no big surprise there - and pours vitriol on the "pompous blowhards" Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, mostly because they, too, had the audacity to dislike slasher films. He "can't stand the French": He went to Cannes once, and declares that "it stunk of fish and looked like Massachusetts." Also, "Alien" is "boring" and a "snoozefest." The blood on the floor is mine, from biting my lip in exasperation. But before I reach for a mop, I might as well sweep up the shards of bitterness left on the ground by Stevie Phillips in her disgruntled showbiz book, JUDY & LIZA & ROBERT & FREDDIE & DAVID & SUE & ME ... : A Memoir (St. Martin's, $25.99). The title hints at some of the problems. Who are these people? And who is "Me"? Well, two names we know at first sight: That's Judy Garland (an icon!) and her daughter Liza Minnelli (an icon's daughter!). The bemused reader learns that Phillips, now 78, is a former talent agent and producer who began her career working with Freddie Fields and David Begelman when those two once-powerful agents left their even more powerful Hollywood boss, Lew Wasserman, to open their own shop. Judy was their client, and Liza was a teenager in 1960 when Phillips, then a "Mad Men"-era gal around the office, got a leg up on her career climb as a kind of minder and body woman to Garland, watching her take pills and covering up suicide attempts. Later, Phillips represented Minnelli. Robert is Robert Redford, whom Phillips signed as a client in the mid-1960s. Sue is the late, colorful agent Sue Mengers, who also joined the agency, by then called C.M.A. In the guise of love and admiration for Garland, Phillips trashes her former idol repeatedly with every sad tale of bad behavior she trots out. Then again, while alternately preening and justifying, she also dumps on her own New York City upbringing (her father was "a vain, vile-tempered man," her grandfather "a world-class philanderer"), runs roughshod over two of her three ex-husbands and disdains Begelman, with whom she had an affair - as did Garland. Ensnared in an embezzlement scandal in the late 1970s, Begelman committed suicide in 1995. Decades after the fact, Phillips feels compelled to note that "'revolting' is the only appropriate word to describe sex with David." The same word applies to too many parts of this memoir, as the memoirist feeds on the (iconic!) fame of others. The character slashing here might make even horror fans go, Ick. There is a way, though, to do a memoir right. Candice Bergen shows how in A FINE ROMANCE (Simon & Schuster, $28). Readers of "Knock Wood" will not be surprised: The self-possessed, witty and down-to-earth voice that made Bergen's first memoir a hit when it was published in 1984 has only been deepened by life's surprises. And the actor who, for the decade between 1988 and 1998, created the influential (iconic!) television sitcom character Murphy Brown freely shares her surprise, first at finding love and marriage with the French filmmaker Louis Malle; then at giving birth to their daughter, Chloe, now 29; then at the phenomenal success of "Murphy Brown." Bergen addresses challenge and loss, too. The success of the TV show kept Bergen and her daughter apart from Malle for stretches at a time; he didn't like Los Angeles, and one can only guess that marital and parental adjustments were even more difficult than the author - honest yet discreet about the privacy of others - lets on. Then, 15 years into their marriage, Malle died of what Bergen reveals was a brain inflammation. Grief hit mother and daughter hard. Bergen faced a post-"Murphy Brown" career re-evaluation. She fell in love with the real estate developer and philanthropist Marshall Rose, a widower, and in 2000 she married him. Her mother died. Bergen tells all this with aplomb and a sense of humor. She is also plain-spoken. Much has been made of the fuss-free way in which she has written about her weight gain in recent years. "Fat holds your face up; my skin is stretched to the max. Wrinkles don't stand a chance." But she is equally forthright about her experience with antidepressants, psychotherapy, Botox and the changes that accompany aging. "In my 60s, I seem to have gotten somebody else's hair. I think Golda Meir's." She conveys her particular challenges as a mother - and those of Chloe as the only child of such a famous couple - without crowding her daughter. And she is revelatory in her contemplation of finance. "I have made a lot of money," she declares with no coyness. "Most of this is the incomparable TV Money. Nothing like it." Then again, "the first year of 'Murphy,' they paid me peanuts, in part because I was far from their first choice for the role; they'd wanted the younger, juicier Heather Locklear." As a fictional newswoman, Murphy Brown was iconically brassy. As a memoirist, Candice Bergen is flesh-and-blood classy. That leaves one final icon up for consideration, a biggie. Indeed, Orson Welles loomed so large - in talent, in contradictions, in girth - that, in the end, his multitudes could not be contained. When he died, he was still working on a project that has been called "the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen." As of today, the work remains mostly unseen, for reasons as outsize as the man himself. And in ORSON WELLES'S LAST MOVIE: The Making of "The Other Side of the Wind" (St. Martin's, $26.99), the journalist Josh Karp applies enthusiastic scholarship, with vivid narrative writing and just the right touch of can-you-believethis-stuff ? marvel, to chronicle what did and didn't happen, and why. The extensive endnotes and bibliography are reassuring, considering the boost Karp gets out of recreating historically important dialogue - and even offhand comments - among real people. What a mad tea party it was among those Frank Marshall, at the time the project's line producer, would call "volunteers in service to Orson Welles," or Vistow. Welles, who also wrote the screenplay, began working on the movie in 1970, having returned to Hollywood after years of European self-exile. He continued to shoot, on and off, for some half-dozen years to tell the story of the last day in the life of an aging movie director, played by John Huston. The day on which he dies, drunk and a possible suicide, is his 70th birthday, July 2 - which is also the anniversary of the day Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the head. Did the movie emerge from autobiographical impulses? Did Welles ever really want to finish it? No answers are forthcoming, and that's beside Karp's point. We've never seen "The Other Side of the Wind," Karp says, for reasons that "involve everything from the Iranian revolution and runaway egos to greed, petty long-held grudges, bad accounting, corporations based in Liechtenstein, complicated ownership disagreements, self-destructive behavior, and an ever-expanding list of individuals who believed they had a legal, financial, moral or artistic right to the film itself." Along the way, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, George Lucas and Clint Eastwood passed on trying to complete it. Word is, another attempt is underway right now. "Who do I have to [expletive] to get out of this picture?" Welles reportedly said, five years into the making of the thing. That's how icons talk when they're just humans. LISA SCHWARZBAUM, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 31, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
In this compact look at the life and films of Alfred Hitchcock (director of such classics as Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest, and Rear Window), the author provides brief histories of many of Hitchcock's movies, some analysis, and a good amount of biographical information. The book is by no means definitive there are meatier biographies, critical analyses, and making-of accounts available but for a casual reader looking to become better acquainted with one of cinema's most famous directors, it provides a solid and very readable overview. Wood takes readers from Hitchcock's early years in the British silent-film industry right up to his last movie, 1976's Family Plot (which, Wood rightly asserts, is an underrated film). The author goes behind the scenes of some of the director's most famous movies and shows us how Hitchcock's personal life and beliefs manifested themselves on the big screen. An intelligent introduction to the life and works of a very complicated director.--Pitt, David Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
A writer once likened Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) to a "malicious kewpie doll," and his rotund figure became familiar through cameo appearances in his films, coming-attractions "trailers," and most of all, in the introductions to the episodes of his long-running (almost ten years, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s) television series, in which he dispensed baleful, tongue-in-cheek comments about his commercial sponsors and provided recipes for the perfect murder. Olsson's (cinema studies, Stockholm Univ.; Television After TV) Hitchcock a la Carte describes Hitchcock as an early, successful example of branding in both movies and television. Audiences knew what to expect, suspense delivered with a macabre wit. The book concentrates on the producer's television shows (usually written and directed by others but supervised by Hitchcock). It also describes classic episodes, run-ins with network censors, and Hitchcock's recurring thematic eccentricities and obsessions, including food, voyeurism, strangulation, and the difficult act of murder. In Alfred Hitchcock, film and literature critic Wood reminds us why the director's films still matter. This brief study investigates themes repeated in his best films, a childhood fear of being falsely accused, incarcerated, or abandoned. Hitchcock's sexual fixations and occasional cruelty crossed over to harassment and threats, explains Wood, such as when actress Tippi Hedren rebuffed his romantic advances. After that, Hitchcock refused to acknowledge her or speak to her on the set. VERDICT While Olsson shines a valuable light on Hitchcock's television work (which may be unfamiliar to today's audiences), the book is weighed down by overly academic prose. Wood's volume is a succinct introduction to the director, though it hardly can be considered comprehensive, since it skips many of the his films. While both have merit, readers should seek out Robin Wood's classic Hitchcock's Films Revisited, and French film director Francois Truffaut's groundbreaking interviews with the great man, Hitchcock. Olsson's and Wood's titles are recommended as supplementary purchases.-Stephen Rees, formerly with Levittown Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A brief portrait of cinema's most iconic silhouette, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980).The director's work has the rare privilege of being equally acclaimed by critics and popular audiences. As such, Hitchcock's films have become part of the collective imagination, and "Hitchcockian" is a common idiom used to describe films that parrot his signature style. With such vast influence, Wood (Emeritus, Comparative Literature/Princeton Univ.; Film: A Very Short Introduction, 2012, etc.) offers an entry-level study of the famed auteur, unpacking the ways in which Hitchcock "can change the way we see." Besides showing off his talent for close reading as he dissects scenes from Hitchcock's classic films and personal life, Wood also provides vital contextualization to the films he analyzes, such as his "British" films and those with political overtones made during wartime. What is most remarkable about Hitchcock's films is his insistence on chance meetings, serendipity and mistaken identity. For Hitchcock, who was famously distrustful of authority, the ordered world, and its reliance on reason, was misleading. He found more truth in happenstance, in which the impossible was made ordinary, and he crafted a world in which the improbable was not only accepted by viewers, but expected. Wood gives special attention to Hitchcock's most famous films, like Vertigo and North by Northwest, but the author also analyzes many of the early, less-recognized films. For all his celebrated artistic sensibility, Wood is clever to point out that Hitchcock was always dependent on the help of others, most importantly his wife, Alma, whom he outwardly relied on for artistic counciland without whom he may not have been so prolific or revered. The breadth of Hitchcock's career and personal life defies easy summation, but Wood's quickly paced, informative biography is a welcome primer for anyone interested in learning more about one of film's most important figures. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
