Remember when movies mattered?
I do—vaguely. Cast your mind back 30 or more years to a time when the next Arthur Penn movie, the next Coppola, the next Mazursky or Ashby or Bogdanovich excited burning anticipation, and the question of whether or not Billy Wilder could pull it together and mount a comeback Read More
The screen persona of Fred Astaire is more enduringly charismatic than that of any other musical performer in the history of the medium. Yet, the now-celebrated report on his
Hollywood screen test gave little indication of things to come: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”
Then along came a magical sprite named Read More
Giant: George Stevens, A Life on Film, by Marilyn Ann Moss. Terrace Books; 327 pages; $35.
It was George Stevens’ misfortune to make the worst films of his career just as modern film criticism was coming of age: Giant (1956), The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) all Read More
The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York and Hollywood, edited by Gavin Lambert. Pantheon, 336 pages, $26.
First, some back story: Ivan Moffat was the grandson of the eminent, sexually profligate Victorian actor/manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and the son of the equally profligate poet Iris Read More
