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This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood
(Harmony, 480 pages, $25.95)
by Jack Valenti
ack Valenti, the dapper, bantamweight, beetle-browed, ferociously charming and articulate kingpin of Hollywood sadly shuffled off this mortal coil only weeks before the publication of his fascinating autobiography. In its pages he reminds us that he’d already had quite the eventful life long before he assumed the reins of the Motion Picture Association of America in 1966, for an eventful tenure of almost 39 years. (He received the DGA Life Membership Award in 2001.) Born poor in Texas to the children of Sicilian immigrants, Valenti had a classic up-by-the-bootstraps upbringing, using his brains and drive to put himself through college and Harvard Business School, but not before World War II intervened and sent him on three dozen hair-raising missions over Nazi-occupied Italy as the skipper of a B-25 bomber. After the war, he built up a Houston ad agency until 1963, when Lyndon Johnson picked him to join his staff of advisors. Valenti’s admiring portrait of the complex Johnson is a high point of his memoir, vividly evoking the man’s charm and political acuity alongside his domineering Texas swagger and frequent barnyard crudity. The book climaxes with a celeb-strewn account of Valenti’s MPAA stewardship, from the twilight years of aging legends like Jack Warner, Lew Wasserman and Darryl F. Zanuck; to his difficult but successful reordering of the Association’s ratings system in 1968; to more recent battles over DVD piracy and the kerfuffle over Academy screeners, which Valenti admits he could have handled better. Although the ratings system has come in for plenty of criticism—the unsatisfactory NC-17 rating in particular—over the years, Valenti does mount a serious defense of it, reminding us that if the studios didn’t police themselves, then sooner or later the government would. Written vividly in an aperçu-filled, raconteur’s style, flavored with an adman’s brio and a presidential speechwriter’s elegance, Valenti’s memoir may be posthumous, but it fairly fizzes and pops with life. |
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On Kubrick
(British Film Institute, 272 pages, $24.95)
by James Naremore
n the years since his death in 1999, the reputation of Stanley Kubrick has become considerably less forbidding and mysterious than it was for much of the last 30 years of his life, when he shrouded himself in self-imposed seclusion. That long sojourn out of the public eye has now been countered by the admirable openness of the Kubrick estate, a fine documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and a flood of accounts poured from the pens of his many collaborators. This wealth of new detail makes it the perfect time for a serious critical reassessment, and there could be no better candidate for the task than James Naremore. Naremore proved his credentials as a cultural historian of cinema with his masterpiece, Film Noir in Its Contexts, which brought a wealth of literary, political, cultural and social knowledge to bear on the genre. The same powers are directed here, to continuously revelatory effect, at the work of Kubrick, whose films are so distinctive that they almost constitute a genre of their own. Naremore battles both our familiarity with Kubrick’s indelible, iconic imagery and the misleading notion that his work is as straightforward as it appears. Almost every page in this readable, jargon-free book contains some startling new fact, nuance or connection, and the result undermines any simplistic understanding of Kubrick as a dour pessimist or right-wing misanthrope. Naremore presents Kubrick as perhaps the last Modernist—that is to say, the last serious (and commercially successful) practitioner of the emotionally withdrawn, bleakly funny and form-obsessed approach to art that had its origins in Joyce and Kafka. He convincingly situates the films within the three-century history of the Grotesque in art and literature. Naremore’s evaluations of A Clockwork Orange (which he dislikes) and Barry Lyndon and The Shining (which he deeply admires) can compare with the finest critical writing about Kubrick. And, taken as a whole, it’s the best thing to happen to our understanding of the director since Michel Ciment’s groundbreaking study back in 1980. This is the state of the art in deep Kubrick appreciation. |
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The Animated Man:
A Life of Walt Disney
(University of California Press, 411 pages, $29.95)
by Michael Barrier
oming in wake of Neal Gabler’s recent, massive biography of Walt Disney, Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man may appear, at first glance, slightly redundant. In fact, it’s more a matter of luck and timing, and the earlier work detracts in no way from the decades of original research that underpin Barrier’s book. Gabler’s tome saw Disney as an American icon, a man who foresaw the world we live in now, or at least devised the blueprint for much of it by establishing his name as an instantly identifiable brand, creating the world as a theme park and practically inventing tie-in merchandising. Barrier’s ambitions are simpler yet more difficult to achieve, but he has at hand a weapon that even the Disney-authorized Gabler lacked. Barrier’s nearly lifelong project has been the ongoing history of American animation. In the 1970s, he was the founder and editor of the animation magazine Funnyworld, and spent over 25 years compiling priceless interviews with pioneering animators—especially those at Disney—all of whom are long dead. Some of this material formed the basis of his book, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, published in 1999. This enormous catalogue of information forms the bedrock of The Animated Man. As the title suggests, Barrier is interested in Disney as a pioneer of the art that was indelibly associated with his name, from the release of the hugely successful Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. He concentrates less on Disney’s supposed shortcomings as a man than on the haphazard, improvisatory manner in which he and his partners took a fledgling form of filmic entertainment and turned it into a functioning worldwide industry. At the forefront of this account is Barrier’s deep knowledge of the technical development of animation and Disney’s place within it, backed by original interviews with people who often were in the room with Disney when he was making his groundbreaking art. The accounts of matching sync-sound to the images of Steamboat Willie in 1928 and the years-long, Herculean labors that brought forth Snow White are as compelling as they are detailed. And Barrier is an intent and scrupulous biographer of the man, finding Disney a bit elusive behind his workaholic tendencies and relentless optimism. Barrier takes note of Disney’s increasing political conservatism, especially after the animators’ strike of 1941, and yet ably refutes—as does Gabler—Disney’s reputation as an anti-Semite. Sympathetic, well-proportioned and elegantly written, The Animated Man may one day prove the sturdier, more lasting biography. |
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Mr. Hitchcock
(Haus Publishers, 192 pages, $24.95)
by Quentin Falk
fter Donald Spoto, John Russell Taylor, Raymond Durgnat and Patrick McGilligan’s gargantuan biographies of the Master of Suspense, it’s a pleasure to welcome Quentin Falk’s zippy and fast-paced “shorter Hitchcock,” which clocks in under 200 pages. Part of the recent and commendable tendency toward brevity and succinctness in the biography field, Falk’s approach picks and chooses freely and deftly from the myriad sources available, and only adds new material in the form of interviews with some of the ancient technicians and actors who worked on Hitchcock’s 1972 British homecoming movie Frenzy. That said, Falk’s command of the materials is impressive, drawing connections and rehashing controversies in brisk, film-buffy and reader-friendly prose, to deliver a tightly compressed tour through the life and work of the owner of the most recognizable silhouette in film. All the bases are covered: from Hitch’s fascination with icy blondes—and his near-obsession with Ingrid Bergman, Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren—to his delight in resolving technical challenges, his celebrated stylistic dexterity and ceaseless innovation, and his very English fondness for ribaldry. In between, there is a fair ration of good gossip and a sound knowledge of film history from Elstree Studios and Germany’s UFA to Paramount and Universal. Included is his fractious relationship with producer David O. Selznick and his financially rewarding partnership with his agent Lew Wasserman, as well as his peaceful domestic life with his wife and most important collaborator, Alma. As is usual with biographers of Hitch, Falk is firmer and more nuanced in his grasp of the early English films. The section on his American career, commencing in 1940 with Rebecca, defers to the now widely accepted belief that only in industrial Hollywood was the director able, in the fullest sense, to become the Hitchcock we still venerate. All in all, an excellent short-form introduction to the life and work of a film legend.
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