March Books
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Held over at New York’s Film Forum, the new restoration of Frank Perry’s Play It as It Lays (1972) will carry on screening through Thursday. Tuesday Weld stars as Maria, described by Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice as “a spoiled and unmoored Hollywood post-starlet, separated from her exploitative New Wave director ex-husband, Carter (Adam Roarke, as a kind of sub-Cassavetes), helpless with her institutionalized seven-year-old daughter, adrift in her own life, and long past the tipping point toward nihilistic self-implosion.” For Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, Play It as It Lays is “a portrait of modern ennui that hasn’t really lost any of its bite in the intervening fifty-three years. Which is intriguing, because the picture, adapted by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion from Didion’s own acclaimed 1970 novel, does feel very much of its era.”
The film’s revival coincides with the publication of Alissa Wilkinson’s We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. In a brief piece for Air Mail, Wilkinson, a film critic for the New York Times, notes that “while many love her celebrity image, far fewer know she spent much of her career in the movie business in one way or another.” Before writing her California-set novels and immortal essays, and before cowriting screenplays with Dunne, Didion was, in the mid-1960s, a movie columnist for Vogue.
Tracking down Didion’s reviews—which so far remain uncollected in a single volume—Wilkinson “assumed she had the taste of a young 1960s cinephile: a little snobbish, fond of underground and downtown cinema, obsessed with form and with auteur theory. She didn’t. While not undiscerning, Didion had quite populist taste.” Wilkinson tells Variety’s Abigail Lee that Didion’s “reviews are very driven by a love for old school, Hollywood, Golden Age, actors playing types all the time and never playing against type.”
In the NYT, Charles Finch finds that Wilkinson is “superb at dissecting the overlap of film and politics in Didion’s worldview.” An avid fan of John Wayne, Didion disdained, as Wilkinson puts it, “what she saw as the intrusion of a Hollywood framework into American political culture, personified by Ronald Reagan. To her, it spoke of a politics conducted all for show, all for appearances, stage-managed and directed and not at all operating how governance should.”
Hollywood Stories
In 2023, several news outlets celebrated Michelle Yeoh as the first Asian to be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar only to quickly follow up with corrections and footnotes: Merle Oberon, born in Bombay, British India, in 1911, was first. But that landmark nomination—for her turn as Kitty Vale, with whom both Alan (Fredric March) and Gerald (Herbert Marshall) are in love in The Dark Angel (1935)—was easy to overlook. Oberon, better known for playing Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Cathy in Wuthering Heights (1939), spent her entire career passing as white.
Anna Kodé offers a fine primer on Oberon in the New York Times, and in the Los Angeles Times, Carolyn Kellogg writes that in Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star, Mayukh Sen “cheerfully reclaims her story, narrating it with sensitivity and verve.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Akanksha Singh finds that Sen’s “narrative is woven with surgical precision, never flaunting the obvious depth of its research.”
Oberon “deserves compassion, not judgment, for the constraints she was working under,” writes Sen in the Atlantic. She was “no self-hating, assimilationist stooge of whiteness; instead, the social and political conditions of her era forced her to pass.” By the way, as you’ll remember, Yeoh won that Oscar for playing the multiverse-hopping Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Oberon lost to Bette Davis, who won the first of her two Oscars for her portrayal of a troubled actress in Dangerous (1935).
Writing for Air Mail, Diane Kiesel, a retired judge of the New York Supreme Court, outlines the story she tells in When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law. Chaplin was fifty-two when he met twenty-one-year-old Joan Barry and, as Kiesel puts it, “was wowed by her impulsivity, flaming red hair, and innate acting talent.” Soon enough, though, Barry became a gun-toting stalker who filed a paternity suit against Chaplin even though a blood test proved her child could not have been his. The fallout from this case, which Chaplin lost, would have major repercussions throughout the rest of his life. Kiesel argues that “Chaplin’s street smarts could have prevented his downfall.”
Lawmakers and Lawbreakers
In Law at the Movies: Turning Legal Doctrine into Art, Stanley Fish takes on big questions through close readings of classic Hollywood films, and Julie Stone Peters, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, finds that he “wears his erudition lightly: no inside baseball doctrine for Supreme Court geeks; not a single mention of Deleuze or the dispositif for readers of Camera Obscura. He may cite Aristotle, Augustine, Donne, Milton, Hobbes, and Kant, but he also cites Cole Porter (‘Don’t fence me in’), John Lennon, and the Marlboro Man. The book is trademark Fish—clever, insouciant, opinionated.”
In 2001, two months after 9/11, 24, the television series starring Kiefer Sutherland as a counter-terrorist federal agent, premiered, and more than two hundred episodes would follow. Three years later, Leigh Whannell and James Wan’s Saw launched a franchise and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ became the highest grossing non-English-language film of all time (and it held that record until 2017). These three entertainments “came from two different media and three different genres, but each of them presented its audience with a world in which torture was effective, inevitable, and above all necessary,” writes Richard Beck in an excerpt from his new book, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. “The fantasy that unites 24, Saw, and The Passion of the Christ isn’t that the right side always wins; it is that heroes can do evil things without compromising their moral integrity, so long as they are forced to do them.”
Events
Marya E. Gates—who discusses her new book Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words with John Bleasdale (Writers on Film), Nell Minnow (RogerEbert.com), and Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times)—will talk with three outstanding directors after screenings of their films in Los Angeles this week. Gates’s tour begins on Wednesday with Allison Anders and Gas Food Lodging (1992), followed by Karyn Kusama and Destroyer (2018) on Thursday and Miranda July and Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) on Friday.
Next Tuesday, Rob King, the author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger, will be at Light Industry in New York to introduce a screening of Metzger’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976). And on March 27, Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes—whose new book The Prop is a study of objects in films (Notebook is running an excerpt)—will be at Film at Lincoln Center to chat with Genevieve Yue following screenings of Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) and Charlie Chaplin’s The Pawnshop (1916).
Endnotes
The latest issue of the London Review of Books features Alex Harvey’s essay on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: “As many of the contributions to The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, a collection of essays and appreciations, attest, the directors have for too long been regarded as ‘avant-garde filmmakers within the system’, neither mainstream nor radical enough.”
Let’s wrap this month’s roundup with conversations to listen to. Violet Lucca, the author of David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, is on Guide for the Film Fanatic, talking about The Dead Zone (1983), and recent guests on the New Books Network include Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola, the editors of the new collection Hollywood Unions, and Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, whose third book is the critical study Bong Joon Ho.
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