Books, 10/1.

"In his rich, perceptive, and enjoyable book on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Michel Chion makes use of production history when it pleases him, but his primary interest is in experiencing the film as a field of signifiers without signifieds," writes Chris Fujiwara in Film International. "Chion adopts as his rule 'never allowing anecdotes about the making of a film to influence the analysis of that film.' (Chion, page 66) In contrast, Tony Lee Moral's Hitchcock and the Making of 'Marnie' mobilizes production history in the analysis of a film on which the critical and popular discourse has already been influenced to an unusual degree by accounts of production circumstances. It's fitting that the first book-length studies of Marnie and Eyes Wide Shut should appear in print at about the same time, for these two films have much in common and, I would contend, can illuminate each other."

Richard Schickel reads William J Mann's Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn and tells us, "In essence, what he's saying is: The rumors about her lesbian connections were true, and they were more extensive than anyone may have thought; that her relationships with famous men (Howard Hughes and John Ford prominently among them) were only briefly, if at all, sexual; that her famous love affair with Tracy was of that character and was broken by long separations hidden from the press and public. And, finally, her tearful recollections of what went on between them - so important to the late-blooming affection in which she was generally held - were heavily fictionalized.... In the end, the book is just gossip-mongering with high-end aspirations."

Updated through 10/2.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Stéphanie Giry reviews Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

"Generally forgotten today, Grayson Hall was an actress who worked mostly in off-Broadway plays but attracted a sizeable cult audience through television," writes Ray Young at Flickhead. "Handsome and domineering, she possessed a stately deportment, not unlike mid-period Rosalind Russell, and a deep, throaty voice tailored to hit the back rows of a theatre. Although she died in 1985 at the age of sixty-three from cancer, her fan base is apparently still quite active, making the new biography, Grayson Hall: A Hard Act to Follow, something of a must for anyone with fond memories of Dark Shadows."

Nick Davis read Christine Vachon's A Killer Life in a single sitting, "a testament to the absorbing way in which Vachon - co-founder, leading shepherd, and most public face of Killer Films - [relates] two decades' worth of professional experience as well as her own forthright, principled, occasionally abrasive, utterly unprecious view of what matters in a movie, and of how the American independent film scene should and does operate (which, predictably enough, amount to two very different things)." Related: Margaret Wappler talks with Vachon for the LAT.

Stephen Metcalf reviews Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (first chapter) for the New York Times: "Whether criticism should be a cool medium or a hot one I'll leave to others to ponder; here I can only be thankful that Greil Marcus has failed to drift anywhere and start murmuring like the wise old excellency he has every bit earned the right to be."

In the Observer, Rafael Behr reviews Rupert Everett's autobiography, Red Carpets and Banana Skins; in short, it "badly needed an editor."

Updates, 10/2: Online listening tip. Ian Buruma is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

In the NYT, Janet Maslin reviews Kate, "a real-life version of one of America's favorite fairy tales."

Posted by dwhudson at October 1, 2006 11:11 AM