Sixteen years of film criticism from one of America's leading cultural critics, Geoffrey O'Brien. Film and popular culture essays cover topics that range from the invention of cinema to contemporary F-X aesthetics; from Shakespeare films to "Seinfeld"; from 30s screwball comedies to Hong Kong martial-arts movies; from the roots of sexploitation pictures to the televising of Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony. There is an emphasis on the unpredictable interactions between film as a medium apt for expressing the most private dreams and film as the mass literature of the modern world, subject to all the pressures of financing and marketing. Many of the pieces are profiles of individual directors or actors: Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Ed Wood, Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Dana Andrews, The Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby whose careers are probed to look for the point where private obsession meets public myth-making.

This provocative collection of essays written over a 16-year period offers unique insight into personalities as varied as Alfred Hitchcock and Bing Crosby. O'Brien, a New York Times, Village Voice and New York Review of Books contributor, defines his commitment to film with hypnotic intensity when he states, "[b]ack in my movie-ridden adolescence, when in the company of a band of fellow obsessives I shunted from double features to late late shows." The chapter "Touch of Ego" paints Orson Welles as a man in rigid control of his own image, simultaneously involved in his artistic efforts and removed from them. O'Brien analyzes the complexity of director John Ford with equal depth, and astutely observes the free-spirited joy of screwball comedies and their destruction by postwar emphasis on realism and domesticity. Walter Winchell, "the inventor of gossip as a form of mass-market entertainment," is not the one-note monster of other profiles, but an individual whose lust for power led him to support democratic causes. O'Brien mounts an eloquent defense of Dana Andrews, never a critic's favorite, and shows why Bing Crosby's currently unrecognized genius deserves more than denigration from listmakers who place Nine Inch Nails ahead of him. Most fascinating is the homage to Vertigo, in which O'Brien convincingly turns the picture's off-centered structure and plot implausibilities into strengths. He doesn't pressure readers into adopting his point of view, but simply and tactfully makes his case through imagery, seducing readers into surrendering their prejudices and joining him on an enchanting ride.

Cultural critic O'Brien (The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading) here collects 28 essays on a range of film and pop culture topics, written over a 16-year period and published in the New York Review of Books, the Village Voice, and the New Republic, among other venues. Some of the topics include the history of Mad magazine, Seinfeld's cultural phenomenon, Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and Ed Wood, while other essays are aptly titled "The Sturges Style," "Brando: Pro & Con Man," and "The Movie of the Century: The Searchers." In his astute analysis of Hitchcock's Vertigo, O'Brien notes, "Only at the end is it clarified that the film has been in mourning from the first, has been grieving from before the start for the ending which was already a foregone conclusion." O'Brien's perspective is consistently thoughtful and succinct, making for very engaging reading throughout. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries. Barbara Kundanis, Batavia P.L., IL

Height (mm) 243 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Width (mm) 163