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lhe great Su‘rrss actor Bruno Gan/ glues a career hest per"ormance as the Rerch's learler‘. managrng to capture hr ~tl1 the physical. emotronal anrl mental ‘.‘.'reck that was Hrtler rn hrs trnal days. as well as suggesting the awe anrl hlrnrl loxait‘» the Chancellor commanded ot hrs tollo\.'.'evs. hoth solrlrers anrl crvrlrans. Assisting (‘xan/ rs a solrrl supporting cast. rnclutlzng .Julrane Kohler‘ as Eva Braun. the \.apr<l glarrrour puss =.'.rho resrsteu' realrt‘. wrth llrtler untrl they executed the” surcru'e pact.
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The premrse of The Keys to the House ~ a gurlt—r'rrloen young father Gianni rKrm Rossr Stuartr attempts to bond with the phgsrcally anrl psychologircall; (lrsahlerl teenage son Paolo (Andrea Rossrl he hasn't seen s‘rnce hrrth — makes one fear the worst. But zeteran ltalran \‘.’r':l(3r-(llr‘OCiOl' Grannr Amelro r'fhe Sto/en Chi/drew rntr-zllrgentl‘, steers clear of lachrymose speeches. swelling orchestral music ano’ cheap rerlemptron. rnsteacl explorrrrg the anthrx'alent feelings parents maj, D
FILM BOOKS ROUNDUP
Taking his lead from F Scott Fitzgerald, David Thomson’s The Whole Equation (Little, Brown C... ) attempts to tell the story of Hollywood in total. In his unfinished novel about the Tinseltown, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald wrote: ‘Not half a dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.’ To Thomson this means taking into account not just the artists but also the money men, the deal making, the context of Los Angeles, and singling out those who managed to assume control of the gamble that is making movies, from Chaplin and De Mille to studio heads Louis Mayer and Irving Thalberg, and so on. Thompson spotlights the 19405, that golden age of filmmaking when movies were at their grandest (Gone With the Wind) and their best (Citizen Kane) and when they appealed to
on“ tuomsou ’1. ‘
,.""4
THE WHOLE EQUATION
A HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD
America’s largest ever cinema-going audiences. Thus, The Whole Equation isn’t the complete picture of Hollywood. He rushes through the silent age, stopping short at the dawn of the blockbuster. It’s more of an attempt to capture the zenith of the making of motion pictures. The Whole Equation is informative, thought provoking and,
thanks to Thomson’s circuitous prose style and evident love of the movies, a thoroughly engrossing read. Matthew Sweet’s Shepperton Babylon (Faber COO ) undertakes something quite different, surveying the forgotten history of the British film industry. Taking his lead from another book, Kenneth Anger’s muck rake Hollywood Babylon, Sweet preoccupies
_g)lll'V’H'.|:IUH :BABYLUN
himself with scandal, from cocaine parties to suicides to contract killings. Diverting as these may be - and they are related with evident glee - the salacious stories come across as a somewhat forced effort to ‘sex-up’ the British film history, recalling Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.
A great deal of Sweet’s book is concerned with the silent age (most films from which were long ago consigned to the furnaces) and with the studio age (pre- World War I to the early 605, from Gainsborough to Ealing to Rank), with the survey tailing off after the sleazeploitation independent years post-1960. And this is as it should be, except Sweet’s choice of subjects isn’t in keeping with his rescuing of British cinema’s forgotten figures. Why, when there’s little mention of well-documented
Powell and Pressburger or the Carry On films, do we get pages on former superstars Norman Wisdom and George Formby? An uneven
but nevertheless often wonderfully evocafive reappraisal of a bygone British industry.
Charlotte Chandler’s ‘personal biography’ (whatever that means) of Alfred Hitchcock, It’s Only a Movie, (Simon & Schuster O ) features way too much ‘Hitch said to me’ content yet far too little real insight (either from Chandler or any of the stars she speaks to: Grant, Stewart, Novak, et al) to be usefully illuminating. It’s affectionate at best. Finally, Documenting Icons (Faber COO ), Jason Wood’s book based on a series of interviews he did with documentary filmmaker Nick
lt‘k liltkH )Ml H l [l
Broomfield, is a solid, if uninspiring, tie-in to some recent and forthcoming releases of his excellent work on DVD.
(Miles Fielder)
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