Lynch, Wyler, Lean, Film Noir and Moore
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| (University Press of MIssissippi, 224 pages, $22)
By Richard A. Barney 
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One of the joys of these interviews with David Lynch, the most famously nonverbal filmmaker of our age, is watching each interviewer try to pin him down on the “meaning” of his work. Among movie directors such enquiry is often the spur to lengthy exegesis on the filmmaker’s part. With Lynch however, given his background in fine arts, invitations into the realm of explication are returned unopened, shot down, dodged or simply fled from in a headlong rush. In fine arts, unlike cinema, it’s kind of rude to ask the artist to explain himself. He did all this hard work for you and now he has to spell it out as well? Lynch most likely doesn’t know the answers himself, and having resisted analysis of all kinds throughout his career, isn’t about to change tack now. That being said, David Lynch isn’t just talkative; he’s really quite the chatterbox. Just don’t ask how he rigged up that gruesome baby in Eraserhead. His voice in these pages is all gee-whizz-aw-shucks—what Mel Brooks memorably called “Jimmy-Stewart-From-Mars.” He’s busting with momentary enthusiasms and lifelong obsessions, and always seems ready to discourse enthusiastically on the act of creativity, with a “jeepers” here and a “golly gosh” there, as is his habit. Despite his reluctance to explain himself, certain themes recur: his mostly idyllic, yet occasionally terrifying childhood in Montana, the Midwest and suburban Virginia; and his trek through numerous art schools in Boston and Philadelphia (he has noted that this sojourn had as much influence on him as poverty did on Charles Dickens). And one can see the tortuous weaving of every last skein of his obsessions into the tapestry of Eraserhead, sui generis then and now. Lynch also relishes the contradictions in his work where other filmmakers might seek to play them down. He is deeply subversive but politically conservative; far out yet homespun; gentle and orderly in person yet responsible for the most unsettling horrors on screen. And nowhere is that more evident than in Blue Velvet, with its quaint suburban vistas of nestling cheek-by-jowl with subterranean insects and homegrown sexual psychopaths.
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| (University Press of MIssissippi, 253 pages, $22)
Edited by Gabriel Miller 
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"I would hardly call myself an auteur—although I’m one of the few American directors who can pronounce the word correctly.” Thus spoke William Wyler at the twilight of his career, as the rise of auteurist film criticism brought studious, young interviewers to his doorstep to recap a magnificent career. And, despite his twelve best director nominations and three wins, seven DGA nominations and one win, and all the wonderful movies that he made, this was not mere false modesty. Wyler’s short speech of acknowledgment for his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1976 (included here) made claims for total auteurship only with the Super 8 home movies he made on retirement vacations with his wife. Instead, when talking of his Hollywood career, Wyler preferred to recognize the contributions of his collaborators, issuing fulsome praise for his cameramen (including the fabled Gregg Toland, with whom he developed—or refined—the multi-plane, deep-focus single take so admired by André Bazin for its “democratic” qualities); his many writers, and particularly his long-suffering but loyal actors (he wasn’t nicknamed “90-Take Wyler” for nothing). In these interviews, conducted between 1939 and his death in 1981, Wyler repeats that the director should not shape a picture to his own ends, but shape himself to the picture’s needs—a lesson he learned during his apprenticeship making 40 silent Westerns a year for Carl Laemmle starting in 1922. Self-effacement enabled Wyler to make a dizzying variety of movies in nearly every genre and on every budget. Having learned early in his career that “these Westerns, all routine and elementary, had to move!” he applied that simple lesson to every project, from the epic spectacle of Ben-Hur to the three-set, precinct-house drama Detective Story. An admirably succinct and precise speaker, Wyler ranges across his career and often tackles his own biggest irritation, the infantilizing effects of censors on his desire to make adult, socially minded dramas (both These Three and Detective Story suffered thanks to Hollywood’s timorous mores about lesbianism and abortion). With his reputation being questioned next to flashier stylists in the age of auteurist criticism, Wyler occasionally seems annoyed, but these interviews prove he knew better than anyone else the true measure of his achievement.
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| (University Press of MIssissippi, 256 pages, $26.95)
By Vincent Brook 
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We've long viewed the film noir genre as the cinematic descendent, the culmination even, of 1920s German Expressionism as formulated at Berlin’s UFA Studios by figures like Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder and Edgar Ulmer. What has been less discussed—and which Vincent Brook tackles so nimbly and thoroughly in Driven to Darkness—is the role Jewishness played in their movies and sensibility, specifically their Jewishness within the often profoundly anti-Semitic German and Austro-Hungarian empire.
On one hand, the Jews of Germany and Austria were the most assimilated, successful, influential and comfortably established of all European Jews. On the other, they were in some ways the least culturally Jewish, or were until the rise of Hitler made it impossible to disavow a religion one had never paid much attention to in the first place. When the axe came down in 1933, their entire world was turned upside-down in an instant, a fate repeatedly reflected in the violent insecurity of characters’ lives in classic noir.
Brook closely traces the various destinies of these filmmakers. Although he may be stretching his thesis to include Lang, who was born to an Austrian father and a Jewish-convert mother and raised Catholic, in this group. Widely regarded as the “the father of film noir,” Lang loomed large at UFA and in Hollywood, and Brook finds thematic and tonal connections to the work of his Jewish contemporaries. But Lang’s subsequent claims about his rediscovered Jewishness after 1933 have been variously disputed as debatable, opportunistic, or mendacious. The other refugees from UFA fared less well in Hollywood and all lost the relative creative autonomy they’d prized at UFA. Ulmer and Siodmak toiled mainly in B-features (including the cheapest, bleakest, noirest noir of all, Ulmer’s Detour), while Curtis Bernhardt, almost as prominent as Lang at UFA, became a low-profile, noir-tinged director of “women’s pictures” (at least it kept him from having to make Westerns, he later joked). Yet no matter their budgets and success, all of them somehow distilled the horrors of Nazism, forced exile, expropriation and sudden “unpersonhood” into their taut, bleakly fatalistic thrillers and dramas. How they did it, how American they became and how German and/or Jewish they remained are the themes of this book. Illustrated by close readings of dozens of their movies, Driven to Darkness is perhaps the most revelatory and deeply researched study of the genre since James Naremore’s landmark More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.
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| (BearManor Media, 324 pages, $24.95)
By Micky Moore 
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You want an epic life story? Try Micky Moore’s near century of activity in the movie business, first as a child star at the height of the silent era, then 20 years later as an in-demand AD and second unit director for a list of auteurs—from DeMille, George Cukor and John Sturges to Spielberg—that it fairly boggles the mind. He started as a child actor in early Hollywood, with co-stars such as Gloria Swanson, but adult success in acting eluded him. No matter, his second act was a doozy. Moore was an AD on the 1956 The Ten Commandments after having played one of Pharaoh’s sons in the 1923 version. He relates tales of working in vivid locations alongside some of the hottest tempers and biggest egos in the business. He worked alongside John Wayne, Hal Wallis, and Paul Newman, and did exemplary second-unit work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Patton, and Lust for Glory (a worthy compensation, he says, for not having been called up in World War II) and, as a second unit director, helped put together the famous truck-dragging sequence on Raiders of the Lost Ark. In a career spanning the growth, high tide and long decline of the studio system and extending deep into the 1990s, Moore seemingly managed to live half a dozen different lives, and he remembers every detail of them richly and clearly. |
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