Books about movies - film criticism, biography, history, etc

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[iconogassed]

Last fall I read Frank Thompson's Lost Films: Important Movies That Disappeared, which provides synopses, contemporary criticism, and extensive production histories on 27 lost films. London After Midnight and other well-covered cases were deliberately excluded. Fortunately Murnau's 4 Devils made it (this was before the rediscovered material on the Sunrise DVD) and there is a wealth of information unavailable anywhere else.

In several instances, the plot summaries were compiled from numerous official sources of varying length, resulting in the most complete version we're likely to see. The highlight for me was the entry for Pál Fejös's The Last Moment, which is just that: a feature without dialogue/intertitles moving in a stream-of-consciousness fashion through the last memories of a dying man. The synopsis that Thompson uses was written by an anonymous theatre musician and appears to recap virtually every second of the film, in a breathless and sometimes frenzied fashion. A loss mourned, presumably, by anyone who's seen Lonesome.

Anywayz, highly recommended. Other highlights include chapters on the syphilis scare picture Damaged Goods and the Lon Chaney-starring The Miracle Man, in which Chaney plays a conman called The Frog who is able to contort his body to resemble a "cripple" and is then "saved" by the faith healer he works for (James Cagney did it over as Chaney in Man of a Thousand Faces).

Robert Sklar's Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies is promising so far. Any film text praised by Neil Postman will probably be worth my time.

[iconogassed]

Robert Sklar's Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies is promising so far. Any film text praised by Neil Postman will probably be worth my time.

This fulfilled that promise and then some. Maybe the single best work of (general) film history I've ever read. Great, crazy stories. Enlightening analysis of the law, production, aesthetics, criticism, and crimes of American movies and thus America. Thomas Edison was such a bastard.

Robert Evans, on the other hand, was a golden shining scoundrel-prince and everyone should read The Kid Stays in the Picture (and listen to the audiobook), which I finished but a few months before his death last year. For all the bullshit, the way he writes about his relationship with Jack Nicholson and particular Nicholson taking Evans as his date to the Oscars when Evans was a pariah is just the sweetest touchingest thing.