Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows

April 1, 2013
Multitasking writer/editor O'Brien (The Fall of the House of Walworth, 2010, etc.) showcases his work over the past decade as a film critic and historian. The historian gets more of an outing in this new collection; substantially more than half the pieces, many of which were written to accompany DVD re-releases, cover such staples of college classes and museum retrospectives as directors Fritz Lang and Jacques Tourneur and vintage film ranging from Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes to Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. The author's insights into these familiar icons are unfailingly intelligent and delivered in polished prose, though there's little here that any reasonably literate movie buff hasn't read before. His take on contemporary blockbusters (including a single TV series, The Sopranos) is often more idiosyncratic and interesting. "Spider-Man, the movie...has a ponderousness its model altogether lacked," he writes, contrasting the scrappy Marvel comics that inspired it with the Hollywood franchise that "descends from above, trailing clouds of magazine covers and licensed toys." His take on Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is similarly well-informed about its pop-culture source (a Philip K. Dick story) and appreciative of Spielberg's abundant moviemaking gifts, while holding the film to a higher intellectual standard than its director seems interested in meeting. O'Brien, editor-in-chief of the Library of America, tends to take a serious, quasi-academic approach to movies; obituaries for his predecessors Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris are appreciative and shrewd about both critics' essential qualities, but he's clearly more in sympathy with the "reverence for film history" he praises in Sarris' work than with Kael's fierce advocacy for "the sovereignty of her own taste." In general, the author is less an innovative thinker than a tasteful summarizer of received cultural wisdom, right down to the concern expressed in his preface that movies are part of the semisinister digital revolution. Smart, careful reviews covering a reasonably representative swathe of movies past and present.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 15, 2013

Accomplished film writer and critic O'Brien (editor in chief, Library of America; The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America) has collected a sampling of his essays from 2002 to 2012. Written for such publications as the New York Review of Books and Art Forum, among others, they range over a wide spectrum of films and filmmakers, the latter including Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur, and Val Lewton. He also gives a nod to the late film writers Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. His musings cover films from the silent era (and recent films about the silent era, e.g., The Artist and Hugo) to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill and such television icons as Columbo and Tony Soprano. There is also a lengthy piece about the debonair Cary Grant. Some of the films discussed are well known to a wide audience of filmgoers (Spider Man; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance); many others will be familiar only to a smaller coterie of cognoscenti. VERDICT Whether one agrees or disagrees with O'Brien's opinions, there is something for all movie lovers in this expertly written, often thought-provoking collection.--Roy Liebman, formerly with California State Univ., Los Angeles

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.