There are two kinds of personalities prone to getting lost in the movies:

1. Those for whom movies are an escape from life.

2. Those for whom movies are a lens through which to examine life—from a safe distance.

On the basis of his new memoir, David Thomson started out as the former and evolved into the latter, although we have to take that evolution on faith, because Mr. Thomson cuts short his story just as he’s entering film school at the age of 18.

HE GREW UP to be a critic—a cranky, erratic, indispensable critic. At least one edition of his oft-updated Biographical Dictionary of Film (1975) is on every cinephile’s shelf, and absolutely deserves to be. Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (1992), his biography of the legendary producer, rendered every other book on the subject irrelevant. I also have a soft spot for The Whole Equation (2004), his discursive history of Hollywood.

But he’s not exactly self-effacing. David Thomson is one of those glorious showboats, like Pauline Kael, whose true subject is not the movie at hand but the critic’s own sensibility. (I loved the early Kael, although she was a monstrously bad reporter—e.g., Raising Kane; I got off the boat when she enthusiastically climbed aboard the S.S. Brian DePalma, which I took to be incontrovertible evidence of derangement. Nothing that happened after changed my mind.)

At his best, Mr. Thomson functions as a vibrantly purring voice of truth (with, it must be said, a touch of cultural condescension about his adopted country). He never seems to break a sweat. For that matter, he never seems to want to. At his worst, his skill as a writer can’t quite conceal an elegant, sniffy agent provocateur who is just as interested in provoking a response as revealing home truths about art.

The greatest critics—Arlene Croce, for instance—are transparent; the ego never gets between the reader and the dance. She’s not trying to convert you, not trying to create or destroy reputations, not trying to show off. She’s just using her intelligence to translate movement into crystalline prose, to make the reader experience the same thing she did, but in a different medium.

Mr. Thomson is more like a performance artist (a tremendously engaging one), not averse to scoring points for his team or, I suspect, accepting applause.

THE BACKDROP of Try to Tell the Story will be familiar to those who have seen John Boorman’s Hope and Glory: Here, too, we have a child enveloped by the uncertainty and fear of the London blitz, postwar rationing and a family that could gently be termed “eccentric.” But where Boorman constructed a predominantly loving memory play, Mr. Thomson’s account is much harsher; he focuses more on what was missing than on what was present.

In the family house in Streatham, South London, there was a grandmother, a mother and young David. Kenneth Thomson, David’s father, moved out when his wife became pregnant: He did not want children, she did. As is often the case, she got pregnant anyway. The father visited his unwanted child on weekends and holidays, while maintaining a separate residence with another, presumably more obedient woman.

“I never heard him say he loved me,” writes Mr. Thomson. “In all our time together, he never made that incriminating statement.”

He remembers being taken to see Winston Churchill pass by in a car; he remembers his grandmother reading to him from Robert Falcon Scott’s journals, but not the grim ending.

The sole common ground between David and his father was sports—soccer, mostly—which, on the page as in life, is reliably stupefying. Also in the mix was cricket, which is far more eccentric, hence interesting, if only someone would take the time to actually explain it.

For deeper things, Mr. Thomson went to the movies with his mother. The first film he has clear memories of is Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, especially that wonderful moment near the beginning, when the actor Olivier is playing coughs to clear his throat before he strides onstage at the Globe Theater.

“I laughed myself helpless at Bob Hope. I was ready to catch Burt Lancaster on the trapeze of adventure.” But none of those movies resonated like Red River, with its story of a father and a son driven apart into mutually murderous anger, before ultimately reconciling. “This was the first story I had encountered that I knew was meant for me. So I could not give it up.”

Mr. Thomson pretends not to notice that the reconciliation at the movie’s end is absurd in terms of reality, and equally absurd in terms of the movie’s reality—more or less on the order of “You boys stop fighting,” whereupon they magically do. Such is the power of wish fulfillment that even a great critic is helpless before the needs sown by childhood deprivation.

Certainly, there was nothing like a Red River father-son reconciliation for Mr. Thomson. He tells us later in the book that as he grew older, and his father grew drunker, there was at least one episode when he had to hold his father down to keep from getting beaten up:

“He roared at me and said he hated me. He shouted ‘Murder!’ And then he passed into a drunken sleep.

“The next time I saw him it was as if nothing had happened.”

IT'S KENNETH THOMPSON who haunts this book, with sins distributed equally between omission and commission, and it must be said that he was a cold, grudging piece of work. When David wanted to attend film school, his father told him he would stand the £100 tuition if his son sought nothing else from him in university costs. Ever.

The deal was struck, and maintained by both sides. At the time, David’s father owned three houses. When he died in 1993, he left his son nothing in his will.

The book reveals much about the author, as any good memoir does—not all of it intentional. I finally understand David Thomson’s deep distrust of the frequent, familial warmth of filmmakers such as Chaplin and Ford, for instance. In this family, nurturing was bartered in exchange for the mute acceptance of hidden, shifting agendas.

Try to Tell the Story is a rueful book, honest and true. It’s a memoir written, not in fiery, recriminatory orange, but in regretful tones of blue.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Joe Kennedy comes down to us as a peculiarly modern figure, a man who formed the mold so comfortably inhabited by Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff. Old Joe was a cold-blooded capitalist carnivore who cared for nobody outside his family, which he was determined to enrich at any cost. On the basis of this revelatory business biography, he never had a business partner he didn’t shaft—or, if he was in a benevolent mood, merely take advantage of.

To cut to the chase: When Kennedy hooked up with Gloria Swanson, she was $500,000 in debt but still a major star. (Swanson was an ambitious but financially incompetent producer who couldn’t control her costs.) When he left her, she was $1.5 million in debt and damaged goods. 

Joe Kennedy, needless to say, pocketed millions.

This pattern is repeated over and over again in Cari Beauchamp’s Joseph P. Kennedy Presents. Ms. Beauchamp is the first person to get access to the documents relating to Kennedy’s movie career, and the breathtakingly audacious iniquity of the story she’s telling more than compensates for a pedantic prose style.

JOE KENNEDY’s fling with the movie business ran from 1926 to 1930, a chaotic period in which the movie business converted to sound—turbulence that worked to his advantage.

He had a rough modus operandi:

1. Find studio in trouble (First National, Pathé, FBO); take over said studio with bare minimum of Kennedy cash in play.

2. Radically cut costs; fake good balance sheets.

3. Effect merger with more successful studio; abrogate contracts and break careers as necessary.

4. Move on to next victim.

A snapshot of our hero in action: He signed the cowboy star Fred Thomson to a personal contract, and the overly trusting Thomson allowed Kennedy to make all of his business decisions. When Kennedy signed Tom Mix, a bigger cowboy star, Kennedy simply cast Thomson into the outer darkness and let him sit and stew, unable to work, unable to negotiate with the studios for his services. Meanwhile, the parade moved on. Thomson died in deep emotional distress on Christmas Day, 1928, leaving an estate of $25,000. Joe Kennedy collected $150,000 from a life insurance policy he had thoughtfully taken out on his asset.

When it came time for Kennedy to put up or shut up for his legendary mistress, he cast Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly, written and directed by Erich von Stroheim, the most flamboyantly out-of-control director in the business, who had a long string of firings and uncompleted pictures trailing behind him. (The Wedding March, Stroheim’s previous picture, had taken eight months to shoot, gone through $1 million 1927 dollars and was never properly finished.)

Stroheim was an impoverished Jew who had converted to Catholicism while pretending to be an aristocratic nobleman. He cared nothing about money, nothing about stars, cared only about fully re-creating his peculiarly rapturous fantasia of the sordid underbelly of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Kennedy was a businessman effortlessly skilled at charming and taking advantage of other businessmen. He’d never had many dealings with high-end creative types before, and Stroheim took him to the cleaners in every way—except financially, of course, because Kennedy had been careful to construct an interlocking series of nets beneath his own investment.

Kennedy had loaned Swanson money—$700,000 to be exact—then kited $650,000 of it to cover expenses at Pathé, his own studio, making sure that Swanson (who trusted him every bit as much as Fred Thomson did) was responsible for paying back the entirety of the loan.

Queen Kelly was never finished and never really released. For Swanson, it was a dead loss, and she was bedeviled by debt for the rest of her career.

As for Joe Kennedy, he emerged from the movie business safe and secure after finagling the merger of his studios and theaters with David Sarnoff’s RCA to form RKO. By the mid-1930s, Kennedy had about $15 million in assets and was the richest Irish-American in the country. Fortune magazine conservatively estimated that about half of his wealth derived from his Hollywood search-and-destroy mission, which left behind a bankrupt mistress and a single chronically underfinanced studio.

Joe Kennedy wasn’t about making movies. He was about girls. He was about the art of the deal. He was about the science of the scam. A predator thoroughly of his time—and ours.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Once upon a time, movie directors had lives before they went into the movies. They fought in wars, they shot down enemy aircraft, they rode with Pancho Villa. They could field-strip a rifle, an engine or a woman, in any order that was necessary.

Once upon a time, there were directors like William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway and Victor Fleming—along with Michael Curtiz, the most overlooked first-rate director of Hollywood’s golden age. But none of the others ever had a year like Fleming had in 1939, when he directed both Gone With the Wind (for the most part) and The Wizard of Oz (for the most part).

As Michael Sragow demonstrates in this long-overdue biography, Fleming didn’t just make some great movies, he lived a fascinating life.

He was mentored by Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (a legendary swordsman of one kind), and the younger man became a legendary swordsman of a different kind entirely. Of course, irony rears its ugly head: Although he loved and slept with many beautiful women, from Clara Bow to Ingrid Bergman, Victor Fleming’s marriage was to a woman he seems to have merely tolerated.

AS A DIRECTOR, FLEMING had all of Wellman’s male aggression and knack for narrative, but he had something that Wellman and Hathaway lacked—a deep sensitivity toward vulnerable creatures, especially children: Treasure Island (1934), Captains Courageous (1937), The Wizard of Oz. And even Clark Gable, the randiest tomcat of his screen generation, was gradually moved by Fleming toward a very moving revelation of emotional devastation in Gone With the Wind.

Perhaps Captains Courageous best captures Fleming’s peculiarly alchemical gift. Working mostly in front of an obviously artificial process screen with Spencer Tracy (a great, tortured actor who had no business getting anywhere near an accent but was using one anyway), Fleming somehow contrived to make a superb film through what can only be called emotional sincerity, with a death scene for Tracy that could wring tears from stone.

I don't think there's any question that Fleming went downhill after his annus mirabilis in 1939. Mr. Sragow launches a full frontal attack in favor of the Spencer Tracy version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), and, against my better judgment, I’ll give that to him because no movie featuring both Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner at their ripest can be without interest.

But no amount of enthusiasm will ever convince me that Tortilla Flat (1942) isn’t grotesquely miscast and studio-bound—MGM at its worst. A Guy Named Joe (1943) has some lovely scenes, and it could have been even better if MGM had stuck to the astonishing original ending that Mr. Sragow has unearthed. (Irene Dunne commits kamikaze suicide in order to be with the dead Spencer Tracy!) Adventure (1945) isn’t much better than Tortilla Flat, and Joan of Arc (1948), Fleming’s last picture, is every bit as dismal as its reputation indicates. Aside from some beautiful color photography by Joe Valentine and Winton Hoch, it’s a dead loss, playing like a very bad Cecil B. DeMille movie.

That run of films doesn’t indicate that Fleming was heading into a flourishing third act before his premature death. Indeed, working, however restlessly, at one studio for 15 or 20 years was not calculated to breed anything other than a crippling dependence on all the technical departments that the major studios offered. Most of the men who spent that long at either MGM, Fox or Warners ran out of steam when the times mandated they go into independent production. I suspect that had he lived, Fleming would have followed Clarence Brown into disaffected retirement in the early ’50s.

MR. SRAGOW’S BOOK IS impeccably researched (full disclosure: I supplied him with some material on MGM), and he writes with the vivacity and knack for the piercing phrase (“Gable is part id, part kid”; “Gone With the Wind would never have become the resplendent thing it is without Selznick, but it never would have found its voice—its bark and its bite—without Fleming”) that has always marked his criticism. There’s no question that he fell in love with his subject, and the book is crammed with detail that isn’t necessarily irrelevant but is nonetheless extraneous. Fleming’s newsreel photography, for example, takes up pages when it should take up paragraphs. To spend 30-odd pages on The Wizard of Oz (and, miraculously, come up with new material) is good sense; to spend 13 pages on insipid studio product like Test Pilot (1938) is a waste of trees.

But even with the padding, Michael Sragow’s Victor Fleming is as much of a contribution to the literature of the movies as its subject was to the movies themselves.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

In 1972, Robert Vaughn wrote a book about the blacklist era called Only Victims. It’s basically his Ph.D. thesis—well structured, even-handed, a bit pedantic, but still invaluable, and I’ve always recommended it to people interested in that period.

It’s taken Mr. Vaughn 36 years to write another book—and it’s a memoir, A Fortunate Life.

Barring particularly interesting off-screen activities, show business autobiography invariably provokes a referendum on the career in question. So here goes: Robert Vaughn was carving out a nice niche as an all-purpose character actor with leading man looks—that Fearless Fosdick jaw!—in everything from episodic television to Roger Corman’s Teenage Cave Man (1958), when he got lucky with three parts: a preppy turned howling drunk in a Warner Bros. soap opera called The Young Philadelphians (1959), which nabbed him an Oscar nomination; a turn as the cowardly member of The Magnificent Seven (1960), one of those unusual movies that is miraculously greater than the sum of its parts; and, of course, as Napoleon Solo in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. on television in the mid-’60s.

Since then, frankly, there hasn’t been much beyond a procession of performances as cold, bureaucratic pricks, kicked off by Mr. Vaughn’s performance in Bullitt (1968), although every once in a while there has been a flourish to remind you that there was an actor buried beneath all that typecasting—his turn in drag as a Robert Evans manqué in Blake Edwards’ S.O.B. (1981) for instance.

Mr. Vaughn’s book does justice to the career, and he has a generous spirit about other actors, as most actors do. He’s particularly gracious about David McCallum and Leo G. Carroll, his co-stars on The Man From U.N.C.L.E, and lets slip the news that Carroll was on a catheter the entire time he worked on the show.

There’s an amusing section on the making of Teenage Cave Man, a typical Corman 10-day wonder in which the post-nuclear world was re-created in Griffith Park, and he spends a good amount of time on the making of The Magnificent Seven, and the incessant psychological jousting of its testosterone-laden cast.

All of this holds interest, but the book runs into problems as it moves into the late ’60s, when Mr. Vaughn’s career began to take a back seat to his antiwar activities. For the most part, his friendships with Bobby Kennedy and Allard Lowenstein promise more interesting material than is actually delivered, although the vignette of Kennedy kicking the family dog in anger will stay with me.

Sections on his spiritual seekings involving Krishnamurti lead to some grim boilerplate: “Man has a horror of aloneness. Is this not why a God was created by the first man or woman?” Likewise, the Vietnam war brings us prose worthy of the dullest high-school history textbook: “The stage was set for 1968, one of the most painful and traumatic years in our nation’s history—a time that neither I nor anyone who lived through it is likely to ever forget.”

Mr. Vaughn tosses off the last 30 years of his life in about the same number of pages, and some of those pages are random reminiscences of the Most Memorable Characters He’s Met—alcoholic wild men like Oliver Reed and Richard Harris.

Mainly, I would have liked more on the research that led to Only Victims. It’s not like the book is obscure; it was reprinted just four years ago, and is one of the few books about the blacklist to take a macro view. Mr. Vaughn seems proud of it, and he ought to be, but he mentions it only in passing.

Likewise, he lets us know about the stars and starlets he bedded in his bachelor days—Natalie Wood, Joyce Jameson—but there’s no portrayal whatever of his wife of 30-odd years, let alone his children.

In many ways, A Fortunate Life is an odd performance; Robert Vaughn obviously wants us to think he thinks, but he neglects to make us feel that he feels.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

You know you’re in trouble when the author of a book on a popular artist drags in lofty literary references to justify what he clearly regards as his own intellectual slumming. In this case, Joseph Epstein, the author of Snobbery (2002) and the former editor of The American Scholar, invokes Proust to compare Fred Astaire’s habitual pursuit of Ginger Rogers to Swann’s pursuit of Odette.

For the rest of this mediocre brief biography, Mr. Epstein sensibly cites Arlene Croce, John Mueller and Astaire’s largely unhelpful autobiography. This restraint is a good idea, because when Mr. Epstein ventures away from fires lit by people more experienced in dance and show business and ventures out on his own, he tends to get lost in the dark woods of his own labyrinthine ego.

He spends a lot of time wrestling with the source of Astaire’s undeniable charm, but charm is a function of personality, hence chemical. Far more important is the continuing ability of Astaire’s art to enchant succeeding generations.

Take Astaire’s most prominent counterpart, Gene Kelly, a younger man from a completely different dancing environment. Kelly always made sure to wear tight pants to show off his—admittedly very nice—ass, and was forever flashing his Irish grin at the audience. He wanted us to appreciate his dancing, sure, but he also wanted us to appreciate Gene Kelly.

There’s none of that rapturous self-regard in Astaire; the idea of a great performer as self-effacing sounds oxymoronic, but I think Astaire might be the exceptional example. His usual expression when dancing was of focused absorption. He communicated a sense of himself as a vehicle—his own ego seemed to fall away as he worked and what was left was dance, dance itself, at its most transparent. Not the dancer at the dance, but the dance in the dancer.

JOSEPH EPSTEIN STRIKES ME as one of those intellectuals who’s always slightly surprised when something great comes out of a broadly-based commercial art form like the movies; reading him on Astaire is like reading Alexander Woollcott on Charlie Chaplin. Mr. Epstein even uses the wretched term “flick” and comes to the ridiculous conclusion that Fred Astaire wasn’t a genius.

If he wasn’t, who was?

Mr. Epstein makes so many snarky cracks about the scripts for the Astaire/Rogers films that it becomes obvious that he doesn’t really like musicals at all, because, as musicals go, those scripts are quite good, with an airy daffiness that meshes beautifully with the creamy Deco sets and the effervescent Berlin and Kern scores. (Only a churl could resist Eric Rhodes’ hopeless gigolo in Top Hat and his attempt at a catchphrase: “Your wife is safe with Tonetti; he prefers spaghetti!”)

Likewise, Mr. Epstein casts aside the choreography for The Band Wagon, even though it contains what is arguably the finest dance in the MGM musical canon, the duet between Astaire and Cyd Charissse to “Dancing in the Dark”—all, notes Mr. Epstein, “done by a man named Michael Kidd.”

A man named Michael Kidd? The Michael Kidd who danced for Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen in It’s Always Fair Weather? The Michael Kidd who choreographed the original productions of Finian’s Rainbow, Guys and Dolls and Can-Can? The Michael Kidd who choreographed Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, as well as The Band Wagon?

That Michael Kidd was a distinguished artist with a gift for the rowdy as well as the restrained, and if in Mr. Epstein’s mind Kidd’s accomplishment doesn’t compare, say, to editing The American Scholar, he still deserves better than to be condescended to by someone who habitually strains for some pretty terrible metaphors (“The Astaire/Rogers coupling was the white donkey upon which he and RKO could ride into Jerusalem”).

THIS WOULD BE A negligible book except for one point that Mr. Epstein makes strongly, and, I think, correctly: Fred Astaire was a great singer—“less a singer’s singer … but that greater thing, a composer’s singer.” Astaire didn’t have a great voice, but he was able to utilize his musicality and extraordinary sense of rhythm, and combine it with respect for the words and the emotions behind them. In other words, he did the same thing for the songs he sang that he did for the dances he danced.

Mr. Epstein pays some attention to the recordings Astaire made for Verve, with Oscar Peterson and a small group, and they are indeed buoyant masterpieces. Appreciation for Astaire’s singing is not a terribly original point, but it draws forth some of Mr. Epstein’s best writing:

“If a comparison is needed, his voice perhaps resembles an urbane and more upper-class version of Hoagy Carmichael’s. The voices of both men have something of the character of the nonprofessional, of the nonchalant, of someone just noodling at a piano keyboard, trying out a tune, slightly off-key sometimes, no big deal, then suddenly things pick up and the song sung becomes not merely charming but in their versions of it definitive: the right, the only way the song should be sung.… [Astaire’s] clearly enunciated, strongly beat, often staccato rhythms were chiefly a dancer’s rhythms.”

This is very good, and almost gets Joseph Epstein off the hook for his overall priggishness. Almost.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Imagine a country where the president uses the full faith and credit of the government to put people to work in hard times. Imagine a country where artists are not regarded as expendable froufrou, or as dangerous provocateurs, but as crucial contributors to a nation’s psychological and moral health.

Imagine, then, a country like the United States in 1935, when desperation impelled a government to do things that no American government would do today no matter how desperate.

Susan Quinn’s Furious Improvisation—a great title for an excellent book, a model of narrative history—tells the story of the Federal Theatre Project, an offshoot of F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration.

Predominantly, the book is the story of Hallie Flanagan, a tiny South Dakotan who indefatigably rode the waves of political reaction as if she were in one of Bruce Brown’s surfing documentaries. Along for the ride are the various artists who were given a leg up by the Federal Theatre: Orson Welles, John Houseman, Marc Blitzstein, Richard Wright, Sinclair Lewis and several thousand others, with special guest appearances by Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan.

Among the Federal Theatre Project’s successes were Welles’ voodoo Macbeth, his Faust, his and Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, a timely, still resonant warning about homegrown fascism. The Lewis play opened simultaneously in 21 theaters across the country, including productions in Spanish and Yiddish.

George Bernard Shaw was so impressed by the sheer chutzpah of the Federal Theatre Project that he handed Hallie Flanagan the rights to all of his plays, in spite of the fact that the Federal Theatre Project paid only $50-a-week royalties to authors.

Along with the rights came a Shavian prescription for proper production: "The plays will be murdered more or less barbarically all the time," Shaw wrote to Flanagan. "That happens on Broadway too; and you must take what you can get in the way of casting and direction just as if you were a fashionable manager. So far from avoiding negro casts you will be very lucky if you can get them; for negroes act with a delicacy and sweetness that make white actors look like a gang of roughnecks in comparison."

The reaction to all this on the part of Republicans in Congress can be imagined—"boondoggle" was the most polite word employed—but the virulence spread; Ms. Quinn writes that "bureaucrats at the state level refused to cooperate across state lines, especially in the Midwest."

And, to be blunt, a lot of the productions had to compromise with despicable local mores; in Jacksonville, a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was cast entirely with white people who blacked up when necessary, which sounds like a scene from one of Christopher Guest’s lunatic fancies.

IT WAS THE 1938 Congressional elections that brought the W.P.A to an end, with the Republicans taking 13 governorships and eight senate seats, and doubling their holdings in the House. It was a strong rebuke to Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court—easily the stupidest thing a great politician has ever done. The new Republican majority in Congress went about the long-dreamt-of business of killing the New Deal, with the Federal Theatre Project as collateral damage.

The new Congress brought the elevation of one Martin Dies Jr., a singularly uncharming man who in time would run the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dies was a Texan who praised the Confederacy because it kept the South, he said, from being overrun by "ignorant niggers." Ms. Quinn thus makes the point that the first victim of the Red Scare was the New Deal.

Hallie Flanagan’s autopsy of her child’s corpse seems fair enough: "[Congressmen] were afraid of the Federal Theatre because it was educating the people of its vast new audience to know more about government and politics and such vital issues of the day as housing, power, agriculture and labor. They were afraid, and rightly so, of thinking people."

Did the Federal Theatre Project make a difference in the lives of the artists it employed? Welles, Houseman and most of the others would still have had major careers if the Federal Theatre had never been devised. But it gave them a place and an environment conducive to innovation at the beginning of their careers, when they needed it most—a boost to the major leagues.

No, the ultimate beneficiary of the Federal Theatre wasn’t individual artists but the public. Ordinary people flocked to the shows, to see a subsidized theater (tickets were $1.10) that couldn’t have survived, let alone flourished, in any other form in America in those hard times—or, for that matter, in these.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at seyman@observer.com.

LEWIS BLACK IS AN INDIGNANT Paddy Chayefsky character come to screaming, sputtering life, but he has a sneaking admiration for a truly audacious con artist. Jimmy Swaggart won Mr. Black’s heart when the evangelist leaned against his own mother’s tombstone and asked for money, because "I know that she would want you to do that."

"You just had to love a guy who had the big brass nuts to invoke his dead mother as a reason for us to send in our hard-earned cash," writes Mr. Black.

My own tastes run to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and professional wrestling. To live in this country, it helps to have a well-developed taste for the indigenous American grotesque.

Mr. Black’s ever-present outrage and jabbing finger are the necessary punctuation to this survey of religions, communes, popes, higher powers, the whole panoply of cosmic daddy figures we use to compel us to lead a moral life. Most religions are covered except Scientology—because, he writes, "I refuse to consider seriously anything Tom Cruise believes in."

Me of Little Faith—nice title—is an actual book, in that it seems that Mr. Black actually wrote it, as opposed to talked it. In other ways, it’s typical. Like the books of most comedians, it demands to be read while mindful of the voice and rhythm of said comic personality; otherwise, the jokes won’t be funny. A great comic says funny things, a run-of-the-mill comic says things funny.

Mr. Black does both, but in this particular case, he does more of the latter than the former.

He was raised Jewish but has evolved into an atheist who looks askance at most religions’ smug attitude about being the One True Way. "This is all—and I’m going to burst a bubble here—absolute bullshit. … Because that attitude is the spiritual equivalent of having a favorite team you root for. … Because what’s true for you may not be true for the guy standing next to you. We all work differently. Each of us is full of shit in our own special way."

At the same time, there’s just a touch of the spiritual, as when he stands beside the body of his dead brother: "I stared at his ashen, lifeless body and knew that he was gone. Yet his spirit filled the room. I felt it all around me. It was so strong that I knew he was still there. In this moment of extreme loss, I was comforted by him, by his presence. I never expected that."

Mostly, though Mr. Black steers away from the serious. He mentions that Hebrew "is truly a language of phlegm," and pays tribute to the courtly, retiring Amish: "How have they managed to do it? And to do it without bothering anybody? It’s astonishing. Memo to all other religions: Watch and learn. Now."

I’ve seen Lewis Black perform a couple of times and would happily pay cash money to see him again—or for that matter, read him again. My only problem with Me of Little Faith is that, while it isn’t a long book, it still has some padding, particularly a play that Mr. Black wrote for the Public Theater in 1981, which hasn’t aged well.

That said, I laughed out loud a half-dozen times—not Mark Twain, but in these deracinated times, good enough.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at seyman@observer.com.

David Price unerringly puts his finger on the primary problem with The Pixar Touch in his acknowledgments, where he thanks his editor for "taking a chance on a book about business and technology and filmmaking."

It sounds suspiciously as though the editor did some worrying about the combination—if so, she was right.

Throughout The Pixar Touch, but especially in the first 100 or so pages, Mr. Price pays slavish attention to the technology that made computer animation possible. But technology is only interesting to techies, and the reliance on jargon and acronyms effectively puts the book into a deep freeze when it should be in its opening sprint.

The first half is full of sentences like this: "The frame buffer had not shipped yet from Evans & Sutherland, so the men started by teaching themselves how to use the 3-D linedrawing system that had already come in, as well as the lab’s mini-computer, a PDP-11/45 from Digital Equipment Corp."

That’s not actually the worst of it.

Here’s the worst of it: "The medium of motion pictures had had its start in the Bay Area a little more than a century earlier at an estate called Palo Alto, the future site of Stanford University. There, an engineer named John Isaacs helped the photographer Eadweard Muybridge capture still images of a horse and rider in motion."

It’s as if someone writing a biography of Walt Disney had insisted on spending dozens of pages detailing George Eastman’s invention of celluloid, dozens more about Edison’s devising of the Kinetoscope and so forth. All of these things were archeologically crucial to Disney’s eventual purposes, but none of it had anything to do with Disney personally. Like Monroe Stahr, he was just making pictures. So is Pixar’s John Lasseter, but we have to hike over a lot of arid ground before we get to the movies.

Perhaps James B. Stewart or Michael Lewis, superb business reporters who also brandish glistening styles, could have figured out a way to keep all these balls in the air, but the task defeats David Price.

Ultimately, the first half of the book is mostly technology with some business, while the last half is almost all business and filmmaking. Needless to say, the last half is considerably more interesting.

Mr. Price also misses perhaps the most crucial aspect of why Pixar has been so successful. Yes, they’ve released eight pictures, from Toy Stor (1995) to Ratatouille (2007), with nary a critical or commercial stiff among them, which is a remarkable record. But, once past novelty’s first blush, it’s not because of the technology.

Lasseter and company went back to First Principles: story, story, story and character, character, character. Disney, the unquestioned animation leader for more than 40 years, began a slow but inexorable descent sometime in the ’60s, when they began allowing celebrity voices to define their characters more than the very ordinary scripts or animation.

Jeffrey Katzenberg revised the formula somewhat by turning animated films into Broadway musicals that happened to be drawn as much as performed, but as The Lion King inevitably gave way to The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas, something new was clearly called for.

That turned out to be a digital technology developed by computer engineers that gave a bright, photorealistic gleam to the most mundane objects, and whose novelty factor was enough to propel even sloppily animated, crass films—and yes, I mean Shrek—to incredible financial success.

For Walt Disney, substitute John Lasseter, and you have the same old story of a basically benign genius wresting enchantment out of an intractable, time-consuming technology that others used like apprentice plumbers. Similarly, the gang at Blue Sky studio, the makers of Ice Age and Horton Hears a Who!, have opted to emulate the razor timing of Chuck Jones and the rest of the reprobates at Warner Bros. animation, and do it extremely well.

Mr. Lasseter is a great admirer of Disney’s Nine Old Men, especially Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. Thomas initially didn’t think that computers could replicate the delicate expressions of pencil animation, but later came around after seeing an early Pixar short called Red’s Dream. I would have loved to have Mr. Lasseter’s telling of that moment, but he chose not to speak to Mr. Price, which seems a terrible pity.

Once he gets past the Himalaya of the technology, Mr. Price tells the story effectively, tracing Pixar from its founding by Ed Catmull through Steve Jobs, who bought Pixar from Lucasfilm for $5 million and kept it going with his personal funds until it tied up with Disney under initially onerous financial terms. Pixar, of course, ended up being bought by Disney and taking complete control of the studio’s animation operation.

My advice: Go directly to Chapter Five, "Pixar, Inc." Pretend it’s page one. You won’t have missed a thing.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at seyman@observer.com.

Why are journalists’ memoirs dull?

Could it be they’re so studiously trained to keep their own personalities out of their writing that when the time for self-expression comes, they have nothing of their own to offer?

There are exceptions, of course—nobody ever called Leibling dull or Mencken boring, and Russell Baker is always charming and elegant. But the norm is Robert Novak, the Prince of Darkness himself, who obviously reread his old columns to develop a timeline for the memoir he published last year. Tylenol PM should be so effective.

Broadcast journalists labor under a particular handicap, because they’re trained to write for the ear rather than the eye, which allows for much less complexity. Tom Brokaw’s books seem to be written by a bright eighth grader—short sentences and an unvarying, lulling rhythm that would stun Babe the Blue Ox. Poor Dan Rather needed a ghost writer to write his memoirs.

Here, too, there are exceptions. It’s nice to be able to report good things about Roger Mudd’s new book, even though it labors under several misapprehensions.

THE PLACE TO Be—for Mr. Mudd, it was the Washington Bureau of CBS News. He gives short shrift to his childhood, and his wife and children are virtual walk-ons, after which they are unceremoniously ushered offstage in favor of ... Everett Dirksen? Throughout this memoir, emotional intimacy is avoided; instead we get the and-then-I-met-and-reported-on organizing principle. This keeps the book afloat, as long as the people are interesting.

For Mr. Mudd, the reporting world basically came down to the following:

Good: Everett Dirksen, Bobby Kennedy.

Bad: A long series of Southern senators defined largely by varying degrees of virulent racism and, of course, Richard Nixon—the gift that keeps on giving. Once, Mr. Mudd sat next to Nixon at a correspondent’s ball. The entertainment was Diana Ross, and in mid-performance Nixon leaned over and said, “They really do have a sense of rhythm, don’t they?”

Mr. Mudd writes well (“The Goldwater campaign was to politics what free verse was to poetry—nothing according to form”) and avoids most obvious score-settling, although he’s still very sensitive about being passed over for Walter Cronkite’s job in favor of Dan Rather.

It made perfect sense to me: Roger Mudd is respectable and dutiful—every woman’s first husband, or, if they have a safety fetish, their last. For more than 20 years, people watched Dan Rather play the part of a broadcasting rock-’em-sock-’em robot, curious to see if this was the night his head would separate from his body. Mr. Rather communicated his inner anxiety to the viewer and gave everything an outsize dramatic tension—it was never about the story, it was about him. Dan Rather had an edgy kind of star quality; Roger Mudd was pure Ralph Bellamy.

In THE PLACE TO Be, he offers numerous thumbnail sketches of his colleagues in the bureau, a mixture of Edward R. Murrow’s boys and the new kids on the block—Howard K. Smith, Dan Schorr, Eric Sevareid, David Schoenbrun, Dan Rather, Marvin Kalb, Lesley Stahl, Ed Bradley and so forth. Graciously, he also pays tribute to the behind-the-scenes players whose names and faces were unknown to the public.

Some of the stories he covered remain genuinely interesting and make the pages fly by—the Civil Rights filibuster, followed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Other tidbits fall flat: Nobody cares about Billie Sol Estes except Robert Caro.

Save for one or two cautious asides about Harry Reasoner’s drinking, Mr. Mudd doesn’t dish the dirt, unless calling someone an egomaniac is dishing dirt, in which case all of post-World War II media would be a vast landfill. This is a book about professionals who had no time for sex, drugs or rock ’n’ roll.

Here’s the caveat you’ve been waiting for: Roger Mudd takes the greatness of the post-Murrow CBS news as a given. I wonder if a couple of weeks spent before monitors at the Museum of Broadcast Communications might not induce a welcome sense of modesty.

Certainly, the Washington bureau had some fine reporters, but they sound insufferably impressed with themselves—the pride that precedes the fall. Mr. Mudd is irritatingly patronizing about the competition from NBC and ABC, and he reports that when CBS hired Ike Pappas away from Metromedia, Mr. Pappas was considered so déclassé hardly anybody shook his hand. “We all felt we were so untouchably pure,” writes Mr. Mudd, “all so conscious of being Murrow’s heirs apparent.”

Your interest in this relentless parade of old war stories will largely be determined by your passion for the backstory of journalism’s “first rough draft of history.” There’s no getting away from Mr. Mudd’s true subtext, best put by Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow: “Jesus, the days that we have seen.”

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

My favorite moment in Julie Andrews’ memoir comes after the first New Haven preview of My Fair Lady. Rex Harrison had a pre-performance panic attack, the show ran to an endless three and a half hours, but Julie Andrews was feeling pretty good. Her vaudeville training had helped her rise to the occasion, and the show had gone on.

She was sitting in her dressing room bathing in self-approbation when the door flew open and designer Cecil Beaton stalked in. Beaton picked up a little yellow hat Ms. Andrews wore in the show, and slammed it onto her head.

“Not that way, you silly bitch,” he hissed, like some road company Roger DeBris, “This way!”

Home carries little earthy charges of delight like that, interspersed with the smoothly narrated story of a life devoted to work and regulated by a somewhat oppressive sense of hyper-responsibility.

In almost all respects, it was an unconventional upbringing: On her mother’s side, Ms. Andrews’ family is something out of an Augusten Burroughs memoir. Both grandfather and grandmother died of syphilis, the former infecting the latter. Ms. Andrews herself is technically illegitimate, the result of a one-afternoon stand. (At the time her mother was engaged to the man Ms. Andrews calls her father—the man who stood by her after she was born and gave her unconditional love.)

Her mother later dumped the family and took up with a disreputable piece of goods named Ted Andrews, and they formed a duo (and later, with Julie, a trio) in the dying days of English vaudeville, during and after World War II. Both mother and stepfather became alcoholic.

Ms. Andrews description of London during the blitz plays like a stirring home-front scene from Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve. After the war, her astonishing mountain-spring soprano and sense of serene calm helped her climb the professional ladder. Things change slowly in England: Her descriptions of English vaudeville circa 1950 match Charlie Chaplin’s descriptions of English vaudeville circa 1900—except the names are more obscure and the acts seedier. John Osborne apparently got it right in The Entertainer.

The crucial moment of realization comes when Julie is 14, on a dreary train trip with her mother staring vacantly out the window. “I remember trying to infuse her with my energy. I hugged her, tried to comfort her, and told her we were going to have a great week of peace and quiet. ‘And I will help make it right and continue working,’ I said. ‘We will get through this.’”

There it is, the ceding of girlhood for the sake of holding things together, not because she particularly wanted to, but because no one else was capable. (Ms. Andrews quotes a vocal teacher who once told her, “The amateur works until he can get it right. The professional works until he cannot go wrong.”)

She craves normality, or at least its appearance. Her foundationally strong but emotionally recessive English character leads her always to put a positive spin on grim events. Her boozy stepfather snuggles up with her in bed, asking for a kiss, but she dodges the dangerous moment and moves on. Anybody else would claim molestation, emotional scarring and victim status—not Julie Andrews.

Likewise, working with Rex Harrison—an enormously difficult, peevish personality (“If you don’t get rid of that c---, you won’t have a show,” he snapped to Alan Jay Lerner during rehearsals)—is summed up this way: “I don’t remember who said this, but someone made a cogent remark: ‘No matter how big a shit Rex was, the truth is he cut the mustard—and for that, one forgave him everything.’” Talent is the only shelter, the only true absolution. About Harrison she writes, “His technique was outstanding, and he moved like a unique dancer, sometimes on his toes or drawing his entire body up much like a human exclamation mark, his arms flung above his head for emphasis.”

She knows that her relentless chin-up cheeriness tends to cast a blinding light. Once, when she was rehearsing the TV production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella and was idly whistling “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” Oscar Hammerstein came up behind her and said, “I really meant that when I wrote it, you know. I was so devastated when Paris fell to the Germans during the war, and remembering the city as I once knew it, I felt compelled to write that lyric.”

She now realizes she was working with giants: Lerner and Lowe, Moss Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein. At the time, however, she didn’t really learn much about them. “Why didn’t I think to ask the hundreds of questions that haunt me today whenever I think about them? I suppose I was so busy finding out who I was, and I took for granted so much of my good fortune.”

So we get a lot of superficial description—which makes sense once we realize that Julie Andrews was always too worried about making money and caring for the lame, the halt and the blind (i.e., her family) to take much pleasure in her own company, let alone her own gift.

Her memoir ends as she’s leaving for California to make Mary Poppins, appropriately cast as a quintessentially English, immensely kind and decent woman.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.