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NEW AND NOTABLE FILM BOOKS  September 2020

Books Leonard Maltin
1016

  HITCHCOCK’S CALIFORNIA: VISTA VISIONS FROM THE CAMERA EYE by Robert Jones, Dan Auiler, and Aimee Sinclair; introduction by Bruce Dern; afterword by Dorothy Herrmann (Middlebrow Books) At first glance I thought this striking, oversized book was a series of re-creations of scenes from Hitchcock films. That’s not quite right. It is a book of images by two talented photographers who were inspired by The Master of Suspense. Some of them are replicas of shots from such famous films as Vertigo and Psycho, but many simply try to capture the mood those scenes evoke. Knowing that they were shot on film in a “widescreen” format makes them all the more effective. Jones explains his near-obsession with Hitchcock in an interesting conversation with Hitchcock scholar Auiler and compares photographic…

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THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
1556

I’m a sucker for Charles Dickens, and I must confess I came to him through movies. It was a showing of the 1935 David Copperfield that inspired me to read the source novel when I was a boy; then I became a Dickens buff. I am also predisposed to like anything devised by Armando Iannucci, creator of The Thick of It, In the Loop, Veep and The Death of Stalin. Blending the sharp edge of Iannucci’s satire with Dickens’ broad-ranging social commentary might seem an odd mélange, but there is much to enjoy in this unconventional adaptation. By casting Dev Patel in the leading role and ignoring skin color and ethnicity, Iannucci is packing a 19th century message in a 21st century bottle. Does it make sense that Asian, Indian, and English…

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JOHN WAYNE, MARLENE DIETRICH, OUR GANG AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THEM

Leonard Maltin
3178

Imagine John Wayne hosting a television show like Entertainment Tonight. In a way he did, when he was rebounding from the failure of his first starring film, Fox’s epic production The Big Trail in 1930. The make-believe television series was called The Voice of Hollywood and it was a series of theatrical short subjects produced by Louis Lewyn, who had co-created Screen Snapshots in the early 1920s. That series continued for decades, offering audiences a peek behind the scenes of movieland. The Voice of Hollywood was essentially the same idea with a twist: each ten-minute episode purported to be a television show being broadcast on station S-T-A-R from Hollywood. Some episodes even show engineers working in a futuristic TV control room.     Lewyn spent his career repeatedly reshaping the same basic concept. Over…

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REMEMBERING OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND

Leonard Maltin
4836

It had to happen sometime, but with the passing of Olivia de Havilland today at the age of 104 the curtain rings down on the golden age of Hollywood. There are other survivors of that era but none can match the stature of this two-time Oscar winner—or her game-changing refusal to abide by an unfair contract with Warner Bros. Her victory benefited working actors of every rank and is still celebrated today. I had one opportunity to interview her, on a rare trip from her home in Paris to promote the 1998 reissue of her most famous film, Gone With The Wind. I had about twenty minutes to pack in as many questions as possible while trying to avoid the obvious ones.     We discussed the…

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STAN & OLLIE & BUD & LOU & BUSTER ON BLU-RAY AND DVD

Blu-Ray/DVD Leonard Maltin
3397

  LAUREL & HARDY: THE DEFINITIVE RESTORATIONS (Kit Parker Films) I’ve been watching Laurel and Hardy since I was very young, when they were a daily presence on local television, but I’ve never seen their films look or sound as good as they do on the new four-disc set LAUREL & HARDY: THE DEFINITIVE RESTORATIONS (Kit Parker Films). The Hal Roach library has been neglected and mishandled for years. In recent years, UCLA Film and Television Archive embarked on a dedicated program of 35mm photochemical restorations, spurred on by Jeff Joseph, who then did a digital “pass” to add the finishing touch. (UCLA also established a Laurel & Hardy Preservation Fund, to which many devotees contributed.) The results are simply glorious. Nineteen shorts and two…

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MOVIE BOOK ROUNDUP JULY 2020: MAX STEINER TO THE KEYSTONE COPS

Books Leonard Maltin
3189

  MUSIC BY MAX STEINER: THE EPIC LIFE OF HOLLYWOOD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL COMPOSER by Steven C. Smith (Oxford University Press) You don’t need to be musically educated to appreciate or enjoy this thorough, meticulously researched and entertaining biography. Smith, who wrote the definitive book on Bernard Herrmann (A Heart at Fire’s Center) many years ago, offers a sympathetic portrait of a man with enormous talent and all-too-human foibles. Steiner was the father of film music as we know it. History would have us believe that it was King Kong (1933) that persuaded Hollywood studios and producers of the value of a full orchestral score. Smith correctly identifies Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game as just two of the many RKO features (produced by David O. Selznick in 1932)…

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THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews
2725

With each passing year we see more documentaries about films and filmmakers. Some get only a passing nod while others are embraced by critics and buffs alike. In The Ghost of Peter Sellers, Hungarian-born filmmaker Peter Medak travels back 47 years to explore what went wrong with a seemingly sure-fire project proposed by Sellers. He and his Goon Show comrade Spike Milligan wrote a pirate comedy called Ghost in the Noonday Sun but the filming was an absolute disaster. Why would a man who has worked successfully in film and television all these years (with some great ones like The Ruling Class to his credit) choose to revisit the greatest nightmare of his career? It boils down to this: Ghost created a wound in Medak that has never healed. In spite of all…

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