Books, 11/11.

"[A]s I page through Peter Kobel's handsomely designed and illustrated pictorial history of the voiceless cinema, my thoughts are tinged with a certain sadness," writes Richard Schickel in a review of Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture. "It occurs to me that the entire history of the movies has become the property of a variety of cults. They gather not merely around historical periods of the kind Kobel examines - his book is a companion piece to a traveling exhibition mounted by the great Library of Congress film archive - but around stars, genres and, of course, directors. There have been no recent attempts to situate film within a broader cultural history." As for the subject at hand, "it is, I think, impossible to restore the silent cinema to a truly vital role in our time."

Updated through 11/14.

Also in the Los Angeles Times: In his new novel, Zeroville, Steve Erickson "manages to wipe clean the presumptions typically guiding the Hollywood Novel, which suggest either that Hollywood is irredeemably corrupt or that moviemaking is a tainted beauty requiring the ministrations of a pure artistic vision to recover its virtue," writes Christopher Sorrentino. "He embeds in his story a deeply thoughtful look at the art of filmmaking, not the pathology of the film industry."

Steve Martin's Born Standing Up "covers the period from his childhood to his early 30s, when, with audacious ambition, he left stand-up comedy to take a shot at movie stardom," writes Emma Brockes, introducing her interview with him for the Guardian.

Also: "It seems remarkably courageous of Thames Television to risk a venture on such a scale - 25 episodes, each an hour long, screened over six months - with work beginning on April Fool's Day 1971. [Producer Jeremy] Isaacs recalls that it 'took 50 of us three years to make: we talked to hundreds of survivors and printed a million feet of film.'" With the publication of The World at War: The Landmark Oral History from the Previously Unpublished Archives, Richard Holmes looks back on the series that "Dr Noble Frankland, then director of the Imperial War Museum, [affirms] 'launched the idea of history on screen.' It certainly did so for me."

Rowan Walker reviews Marianne Faithfull's Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

Also in the Observer: "Almost half a century after his death, [Cecil B] DeMille's name is shorthand for spectacle, heaving bosoms and epic excess," writes Peter Preston. "He made more than 80 movies, start to finish, and almost all of them coined a profit. What more could anyone ask? Surely, a little shrewd critical assessment to mix with the hype, and Simon Louvish supplies exactly that, playing scholar as diligently as he tours the gossip circuit." The book: Cecil B DeMille and the Golden Calf.

Otto Preminger, writes Richard Schickel, this time in the New York Times, was "a civilized, upper-class Jewish émigré from Vienna, son of Emperor Franz Josef's chief legal defender; a political liberal; a man capable of courtly kindness and generosity to favored colleagues; a shrewd showman with a genius for manipulating the press; a producer who in the 1950s became one of the first great masters of independent (as opposed to studio system) production; and, finally, a cinematic stylist with a unique, if sometimes limiting, manner. Still, as in the movies, legend trumps reality, and it is Otto the Ogre who dominates much of [Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King], Foster Hirsch's earnest, sympathetic, but rather pedestrian biography."

More from Gerald Bartell in the Washington Post, where you'll also find Charles Matthews on Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis, Michael Dirda on Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote and Jonathan Yardley on two new books on Ethel Merman.

Back in the NYT and not directly film-related, but still: Jed Perl on John Richardson's A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917 - 1932: "This powerhouse of a book spans a dauntingly complicated time in Picasso's life and in European history as well, taking us from World War I and Picasso's adventures with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes to the riotously erotic images of Picasso's youthful mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and the darkening situation of the early 1930s." Related: Time's Richard Lacayo has been reviewing the book in installments; more from John Freeman in the LAT.

Thomas Mallon on Michael S Sherry's Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy: "What Sherry calls a 'queer moment' of midcentury creative ferment saw gay artists like Tennessee Williams and Aaron Copland producing an 'accessible; modernism, whose achievements sometimes seemed to portray American ways and ideals more attractively than the work of their heterosexual colleagues."

Related: Stacey D'Erasmo reviews The Third Sex, a "little book from 1927" to which Henri Gauthier-Villars, or Willy, first husband of Colette, attached his name: "It's not about the love that dared not speak its name; it's about the love that didn't quite know what its name was yet and was trying on many different ones, all at the same time."

Updates, 11/13: Richard Lacayo talks with John Richardson about his Picasso biography.

Powell's has a Q&A with Steve Erickson (Zeroville).

Ryan Gilbey: "While reading Emma Brockes' interview with Steve Martin in Saturday's Weekend magazine, I had a thoroughly pleasant sensation. I'm not ashamed to say that I experienced a faint kind of love for Martin. I realised suddenly that this man and his films had once been incredibly important to me - and, evidently, still are. To paraphrase an annoying mid-1990s advertising campaign for breakfast cereal, I had forgotten how good he was."

Update, 11/14: Nancy Dalvy in the New York Observer on Picasso: "Immersing oneself in this biography is like taking a grand tour through the life of the artist; a telegram home might read, 'Apollinaire dead. Cocteau increasingly annoying.'"

Posted by dwhudson at November 11, 2007 2:01 PM