Before the year goes out I want to mention one of my favorite reads of recent months, even though it’s copyright 2001 (now in Da Capo paper). James Harvey’s MOVIE LOVE IN THE FIFTIES (Knopf) had me hankering for the nightly pre-sleep read, and it’s added a score of flicks to my rental list. Harvey is author of ROMANTIC COMEDY: IN HOLLYWOOD FROM LUBITSCH TO STURGES (which I haven’t read), and this one clearly underwent a title change to make the marketing dept. happy. It could have been called ROMANTIC NOIR, as it covers the other side of that era’s greatness, with masterful portraits of major figures like Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Doris Day, Deanna Durbin, and many others. Here’s Harvey on Humphrey Bogart: “Bogart’s face had become by 1950 not only ‘an image of our condition’ but of our final best hopes for it: the face of someone not only battered by experience but deepened by it too — a face of dreadful beauty.” And here he is on Hawks’s RED RIVER casting:
“And that turns out to be, I think, one of the most inspired pairings in movie history, and one of the most inspiriting: pitting Clift’s subtlety and sensitivity against Wayne’s macho force and bluntness — the new idea of manliness against the old, and yet suggesting a continuity between them, too. Hawks’s movie really does persuade you (no other movies of the time even tried to) that Clift’s Matt COULD actually ‘come from,’ and even belong to, the world of this familiar ‘father’ and still belong — like all shining ‘sons’ — to another order of being, more adventurous, more hopeful…”
You’d have read that quote in FEVER if I’d read it in time.
ALSO (mostly from 2003):
The Conversations : Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)
Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and Memory, by Devin McKinney (Harvard)
Visions of Jazz, by Gary Giddins (Oxford)
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson (Crown)
Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller, by Gregg Herken (Henry Holt)
Dreamtime: Chapters from the Sixties, by Geoggrey O’Brien (Counterpoint)