Books, 8/16.

The Telegraph is running extracts from Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters (parts 1 and 2; reviewed by John Carey for the Sunday Times), while the Independent runs extracts from Eleanor Coppola's Notes on a Life and FilmInFocus runs an excerpt from Simon Louvish's Mae West: It Ain't No Sin.

For Granta, Roy Robins takes a quick look at how this year's adaptations are faring; in short, not too well so far, but there may be hope yet.

The centerpiece of Robins's roundup is, naturally, Elegy. Molly Young: "I notice that the men on either side of me, both alone in the theater, are crying. They wouldn't get weepy over the book. The Dying Animal, like many of [Philip] Roth's novels, is brutal. The title change suggests the nature of the adjustments involved in bringing Roth to the screen: mainly, softening the pornographic into the erotic."

Also in n+1, Nikil Saval on The Dark Knight: "Comic book films are not flexible adult forms, designed to provoke thought, but inflexible teenage forms, designed to elicit consent. Their fundamental constants - the crushing loneliness of feeling outcast, the performative fakery of adult life (cf. billionaire with busty ballerina) - serve to buffer every conceit that this childishly self-regarding nation has about its mission in the world."

Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis runs on at the Pacific Film Archive through August 23. Max Goldberg:

In the simple take, film noir got its plots from 30s hardboiled fiction and its looks from German Expressionism. But this equation doesn't account for the fact that noir continued to have a literary pedigree into the 50s and 60s. When film historians say that film noir ended with Touch of Evil (1958), they are in large part speaking of the demise of a certain kind of studio assemblage (David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger end their survey The Classical Hollywood Cinema in 1960, two years after Welles's Tijuana noir). Goodis wrote much of his best work in this twilight era, and in tracing the many film adaptations of his work one comes away with a fascinating zigzag of noir's acclimatization to the new ghettos of art cinema, erotic thrillers, Euro-trash, and cable television.

Related: Michael Guillén has extensive notes on the introductory remarks from series curator Steve Seid and essayist Mike White preceding the screening of Shoot the Piano Player. And Ryland Walker Knight finds that Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall and his earlier Out of the Past "make a fine pair precisely because they are so divergent (yet remarkably consistent)," while, writing about Nightfall at his own blog, Max Goldberg is "struck by the parallels to the Coens." Update: Michael Guillén's just added notes on the "Introductory Remarks By Curator Steve Seid and 'Noirchaeologist' Eddie Muller" preceding that Nightfall screening.

Also at Moving Image Source, Mark Asch and Cullen Gallagher on Jim Thompson:

Practically every book he wrote could be called The Killer Inside Me: depravity is innate, character is defined by thought more than action, and narration is generally first-person. Like most hard-boiled heavyweights, Thompson has frequently been adapted to the screen - and he wrote for it, penning The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957) for Stanley Kubrick and cashing TV paychecks throughout the 60s - but his notes from the underground present unique challenges. The cynical voices of Marlowe and Spade made it in pictures, all that crackerjack banter, but Thompson's characters mask their depths in social interactions. His unreliable narration grants us access to the subjective paranoia of his killers: the lens of their gaze blurs together the contortions of a diseased mind and the twists of a pulp plot, and we come to empathize with their nihilism. The problem of adapting this most interior of voices is the problem of all page-to-screen adaptations, writ monstrously large: how to flip them inside-out?

And Andrew Tracy addresses the "need to historicize the strategies and devices that [Alain Resnais's] three most famous feature-length works - Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963) - deployed to such influential effect. Cinematheque Ontario's pairing of new prints of some of Resnais's official classics with a sampling of some of the maudit, rarely screened directorial efforts of the late Marienbad scribe and celebrated nouveau roman writer Alain Robbe-Grillet affords just such a chance, precisely because the diverging paths taken by the two necessitates an explanation - or an excuse - for the impact of their epochal one-off collaboration." Memory / Montage / Modernism: Alain Resnais & Alain Robbe-Grillet runs through Wednesday.

Acquarello: "In Manoel de Oliveira, Randal Johnson's comprehensive and informative critical evaluation of the Portuguese filmmaker's body of work for the Contemporary Film Directors series, Johnson insightfully points out that the first 43 years of Oliveira's film career coincides with the repressive, right wing regime of António de Oliveira Salazar and Estado Novo, an era of severe censorship and authoritarian government that would lead Oliveira to complete only two feature films between 1931 and 1963. This cultural intersection provides the integral framework for deconstructing Oliveira's idiosyncratic and deeply personal cinema: an aesthetic that was equally forged by creative ideas on the essence of film form as it was by a humanist impulse and uncompromising moral - though not moralistic - stance."

The opening paragraph of Lisa Fugard's review of Bret Lott's novel, Ancient Highway:

Eleven-year-old Earl Holmes is mortified when he goes to his first movie, in a small Texas town in the early 1920s, and the usher rips his ticket in half. Surely it's confirmation that going to the "flickers" is a sin. But then he decides this "humiliation" is part of the ritual and slips into the darkened theater for Folly of Vanity with Billie Dove. Just three years later, completely in thrall to the silent screen, he's hopping a freight train for Los Angeles and the hardscrabble life of an actor.

More from Lynell George in the Los Angeles Times. But also in this week's New York Times Book Review is Stacey D'Erasmo on A Blessed Child, the fourth novel by Linn Ullmann, daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman. The story "concerns the mingled fates of three sisters - Erika, Laura and Molly - who are the daughters, by three different women, of Isak Lovenstad, a renowned gynecologist who in his old age lives alone on a tiny Swedish island called Hammarso, which bears at least a passing resemblance to Faro, the island where Bergman lived for much of his life and where he died in 2007."

And in the paper: "Barry Feinstein, the rock 'n' roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he came across a long-forgotten bundle of pictures, dozens of dark, moody snapshots of Hollywood in the early 1960s," writes Julie Bosman. "And tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan.... [A]fter languishing in storage for more than 40 years, the text and photographs will be published in November in a collection titled Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript."

Posted by dwhudson at August 16, 2008 11:37 AM