There's been a flood of books by and about screenwriters in
recent years: Fante/Southern/Trumbo/Bolt/Salter/Laurents/
Waterhouse/Dahl/Siodmak/Goldman/Gordon/Hayes/Raphael ... All
are good to excellent; at the very least they're competent and
achieve professional publication standards. This hopelessly
addled claptrap, cluelessly cobbled together by the Abbott &
Costello of film scholarship, is an alltime low. They think
the episode of TV's M*A*S*H made in black-and-white -- obviously to
approximate Korean War-era news reportage -- is an example of
"noir style." Which would make every episode of I LOVE LUCY and
WAGON TRAIN and the Walt Disney show prior to the advent of color
TVs all examples of "noir." (As for the M*A*S*H episode "sans
sound" -- fellas, adjust that volume control -- or your hearing
aids!) Their prose? Get a load of this: "In retrospect, the
cold war's outbreak foreshadowed the ruin of Polonsky's body of
work as a touchstone for the immediate future for the American
art film." Wow. Their critical acumen? TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS
HERE is "widely hailed as the ultimate cinematic critique of
American western mythology." Really? More so than another little release that same year -- what was it called? -- THE WILD
BUNCH? Edward Dmytryk's "visual sadism" was "often realized
through the direction of Robert Ryan." By "often" they mean
"once." (In CROSSFIRE -- after which Dmytryk didn't direct Ryan
again for about 20 years, and then only in a cameo as a
sympathetic general in ANZIO.) The whole book is like this!
Every page, often every sentence, sometimes each PART of a
sentence -- is simply harebrained. In their hilarious attempt
to describe the trend of movie stars breaking free of the old
studio system and forming their own companies, instead of citing,
say, Humphrey ("Santana") Bogart, or John ("Batjac") Wayne, or
Kirk ("Bryna") Douglas -- or Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, etc.
-- who do they come up with? Why, none other than that prolific
producer whose career positively THRIVED beyond the studio era,
that double threat: Hedy Lamarr (hey, rhymes with "noir")!
A laff riot.