Books, 10/4.

"One of the virtues of Robert B Ray's marvellous The ABCs of Classic Hollywood is its grasp of the parts that hazard and happenstance play in even the most controlled filmmaking arena," writes Christopher Bray in the TLS. "At first glance the book might be another introduction to the works of four directors who came of age during the golden age of the popular cinema. But Ray knows that movies are far too slippery and protean to be governed by even the most inflated of egos. Though he never quotes Orson Welles's definition of film directors as men whose job it is 'to preside over accidents,' something of that spirit infuses his book. The movies he considers - Grand Hotel (1932), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Meet Me in St Louis (1944) - are a disparate bunch. An adept might be able to isolate nodes that link these pictures; otherwise what is most remarkable is that none of them is anything like a masterpiece. So what? says Ray: these are films I like."

"As brilliant an actor as [Alec] Baldwin can be, his comic acuity may be so keen partly because we associate him in real life with a darker, more dolorous personality," writes Alex Kuczynski in the New York Times. "His new book, A Promise to Ourselves, is a treatise on how the family law system in America is broken, and why it should be changed. It is a serious book, masquerading as a manifesto but eventually turning into a desperately sad memoir, layered beneath the polemic, about the failure of Baldwin's marriage and his estrangement from his only child."

Steve Zaillian will adapt Charles Brandt's I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Final Ride of Jimmy Hoffa for Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, reports Variety's Michael Fleming.

The New York City Opera has commissioned Philip Glass to write an opera about Walt Disney based on Peter Stephan Jungk's novel, The Perfect American, reports Laura Barnett.

Also in the Guardian, Emma Brockes: "There is a good story lurking in [Susie Boyt's] My Judy Garland Life, not about the author's obsession with the dead singer, but about growing up in a family so large and ramshackle that by the time she came along, 'all the major personality types had been taken.'"

"Have You Seen...? is half a million words long, over 1,000 pages, and deals with 1,000 films," notes John Walsh in the Independent. "Just as Thomas Macaulay was supposedly the last man to have read every worthwhile book published, [David] Thomson may be the last critic to have seen every worthwhile movie from the Lumière brothers' L'Arroseur Arrossé (1895) onwards." And Antonia Quirke talks with Thomson for the New Statesman.

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2008 10:40 AM