Author Archive for: ‘D.B. Jones’

Geoffrey Cocks, James Diedrick, Glenn Perusek (eds), Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick Film, and the Uses of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. ISBN 0 299 21610 1 (hb) $60.00 ISBN 0 299 21614 4 (pb) $27.95 355pp (Review copy supplied by University of Wisconsin Press) For those to whom this series is new, as it was to me, …

Robert Brent Toplin, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How one film divided a nation. University of Kansas Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 7006 1452 4 US$34.95 (hb) 162pp (Review copy supplied by University of Kansas Press) Robert Brent Toplin’s Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How one film divided a nation marshals numerous sources and considerable evidence in the service of a plodding and specious argument. …

Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard. Manchester University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 7190 6759 6 (pb) £14.99 304pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) In its essentials, my experience with Godard is, I believe, far from unusual. First captivated by the cultural insight in Masculin feminin (France/Sweden, 1966), then awed by the Brechtian method and ideological criticism in La Chinoise (France 1967), I was stunned …

Tom McSorley, Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster. University of Toronto Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-4426-1048-4 US$16.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) To his credit, Atom Egoyan has achieved some commercial success and considerable international acclaim without fully capitulating to standard audience expectations. His films are difficult. There is both a stylistic continuity and thematic consistency in them. The question …

Gerd Gemünden, A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-84545-419-7 US$27.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Berghahn Books) When asked about the meaning of one of his paintings, Picasso reportedly shrugged, “Don’t ask me. I’m the artist.” I thought of this quote when pondering Gerd Gemünden’s book on Billy Wilder. Gemünden says his premise …

Peter William Evans, Carol Reed. Manchester University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 7190 6367 1 224 pp £14.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) Carol Reed may be the best director in English-language cinema whose body of work is not widely known. Everyone has seen The Third Man (UK, 1949) his greatest work. Odd Man Out (UK, 1947) is reasonably well known. A …

Steven Jay Schneider (general editor), 1001 Movies you must see before you die. Quintet Publishing Limited, 2005. ISBN: 0 7641 5701 9 960pp US$35.00 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Barron’s Educational Series) Many years ago, a friend of mine, then about twenty-five, wrote to me that he had embarked on Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime reading plan, a list of over a hundred …

Bernard Eisenschitz, Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. (Tr. by Tom Milne.) University of Minnesota Press, 2011 ISBN 978-0-8166-7621-7 US $24.95 (pb) 624pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) This book by Bernard Eisenschitz is, if anything, thorough: 492 pages of text, another 106 of notes, filmography, and index.  Although not a work of criticism, and reticent about the …

Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood. London: BFI Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 1 84457 050 9 360pp US $24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI publishing) Back in the 1960s, before Hollywood movies were considered legitimate critical fare in English-speaking countries, two superb books helped change things. One was Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films (1965), the first …

Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr, Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western University of California Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-520-25866-2 US $39.95(hb) 344pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Not surprisingly, themes of landscape, Manifest Destiny, and the western character loom large in Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western, but the book has …

David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. ISBN: 0 375 40016 8 416pp U.S. $27.95 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Alfred A. Knopf) David Thomson’s new book is less a history of Hollywood than a tentatively gonzo, utterly unsystematic elaboration of a particular idea that interests him: that the urge to create art and …

Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010 ISBN 9780773536630 CA$34.95 (pb) 574pp (Review copy supplied by McGill-Queen’s University Press) One indication of the inordinate influence the National Film Board of Canada has had on documentary film is the number of units or …

Melanie J. Wright, Religion and Film: An Introduction. I.B.Tauris, 2007. ISBN: 978 1 85043 886 1 US$26.95 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris) The subtitle of Melanie Wright’s study of the treatment of religion in film suggests a textbook, but although Religion and Film has pedantic stretches, it is a mostly thoughtful and often insightful consideration of how film has …

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. Edinburgh University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978 0 7486 2400 3 £18.99 (pb) 208pp Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press. Most film people, I believe, think of film noir as a phenomenon that emerged in the late 1930s, blossomed in the next two decades, then slowly subsided, generating the occasional …

William Baer (ed), Elia Kazan: Interviews. University of Mississipi Press, 2000. ISBN: 1 57806 224 1 (pb) 268pp US $18.00 (review copy supplied by University of Mississippi Press) Uploaded 1 December 2001 Elia Kazan’s career is unique among major American film directors in that he achieved at least equal acclaim in the theatre, where he worked with the leading American …

Louis Nowra, Walkabout. NSW: Currency Press, 2003 ISBN 0 86819 700 9 Au $14.95 (pb) (review copy supplied by Currency Press) Louis Nowra’s Walkabout is a succinct, very good, useful close reading of Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film even though it may not achieve its ultimate aim. Nowra, a versatile author of plays, novels and screenplays, writes about the film clearly, without academic …

Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience. Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN 0 674 00726 3 US $18.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Harvard University Press) Uploaded 20 September 2002 Three-quarters into Brian DePalma’s Scarface (1983), an extraordinary moment occurs. A drunk, depressed, and abusive Tony Montana (Al Pacino), after finishing his meal in a swank restaurant and witheringly insulting his wife, turns his …

Edward Buscombe, The Searchers. London: BFI, 2000. ISBN 0 85170 820 X 79pp US$12.95 (pb) Uploaded 25 July 2002 A tricky film, The Searchers (1956). The audience is drawn into identifying with Ethan, played by that icon of Westerns, John Wayne, only to learn to its growing discomfort that our hero is not only a racist, but a hate-filled, sexually frustrated, murderous …

John Orr, Hitchcock and Twentieth Century Cinema. Wallflower Press, 2005. ISBN: 1 904764 55 X 224pp £16.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Harold Bloom, the prolific and eccentric literary critic, has argued not just that Shakespeare is English literature’s nonpareil, but that he created modern humanity, by establishing patterns of language, thought, and wisdom that, whether we are …

Cindy Patton, Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 0-8166-3412-2 US$19.50 (pb) 232pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) From the title, subtitle, and the advertising blurbs, I was expecting from this book an anatomy of a problem film, namely Elia Kazan’s Pinky (USA 1949). But that’s not what the book is. Only a …

Scott Anthony, Night Mail. London: British Film Institute, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1-84457-229-8 £9.99 stg (pb) (Review copy supplied by British Film Institute) Night Mail, the GPO Film Unit’s 1936 paean to the British rail-based mail delivery system, occupies an ambivalent place in documentary history. It is almost always cited as a seminal film, but its influence on modern documentary form is …

Philip Gillett, Movie Greats: A Critical Study of Classic Cinema. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008 ISBN: 978 1 84520 653 6 US$29.95 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers) Philip Gillett is obsessed with canons. He doesn’t like any of the existing ones. His ostensible intent in this book is to establish a fresh set of criteria by which to …

Peter Geller, Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North, 1920-45. University of British Columbia Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 7748 0928 0 (pb) 256pp Canadian $29.95 (Review copy supplied by UBC Press) The cover photo of Peter Geller’s Northern Exposures shows a white man and his camera in a kayak on a decontextualized body of water, but a more apt choice might …

Edward Buscombe, Unforgiven. London: British Film Institute, 2004. ISBN: 1 84457 033 9 96pp £8.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by British Film Institute) Perhaps the most interesting critical question about Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) is its place in the western genre. As Edward Buscombe makes overwhelmingly clear in this richly packed, rewarding monograph, “one of the most pleasurable things about Unforgiven is the variety …