From the Fall 2021 Cinema Scope. — J.R.
The way the Internet Movie Database tells it, two pairs of writerly brothers worked with Josef von Sternberg on his first talkie, Thunderbolt (1929), recently released on a Kino Lorber Blu-ray (with a knowledgeable audio commentary by Nick Pinkerton that I’ve so far only sampled). Charles and Jules Furthman are both credited for “story,” though Jules, the younger of the two, gets a screen credit for the actual script; Herman J. Mankiewicz is credited for “dialogue,” while his younger brother, Joseph L., is credited for “titles.”
The question is: What titles? The Thunderbolt that I’ve seen and heard many times has none and needs none. Yet according to the American Film Institute’s online catalogue, there was also a silent version of the film—clearly one more missing Sternberg silent, along with The Exquisite Sinner (1926), the Chaplin-produced A Woman of the Sea(1926), The Dragnet (1928), and The Case of Lena Smith (1929), albeit one I’ve never heard mentioned before now.
John Grierson, one of the few people who saw A Woman of the Sea, concluded that “When a director dies, he becomes a photographer”—a verdict that I doubt Stanley Kubrick would have agreed with, although I’m sure that treating Sternberg strictly as a photographer and visual artist has led to the unwarranted critical downgrading of both Thunderbolt, his first sound film, and Anatahan (1955), his last (and a far greater achievement). Read more
The main introduction to my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (University of California Press, 1995). My apologies for not updating the links. — J.R.
This book is intended as a companion and sequel to an autobiographical experiment I carried out in the late 1970s, published in 1980 by Harper & Row as Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. The present volume doesn’t require a reading of that earlier book — long out of print, though recently reprinted by the University of California Press so as to reappear alongside this collection; however, since many of this volume’s premises are predicated on either extensions or inversions of the premises of its predecessor, a few words about that book and the material it covers are in order.
Most of Moving Places is concerned with my childhood in northwestern Alabama, specifically in relation to my family and what was known as the family business from around 1914 to 1960. This business began when my grandfather, Louis Rosenbaum, started operating his first movie theater in Douglas, Wyoming, and it existed until Rosenbaum Theaters, owned by my grandfather and managed by my father, was sold to a larger chain. I was born in 1943, and the family business afforded me a steady diet of free movies through the age of sixteen, when I went away to school in Vermont. Read more
Here is a chronological list of many of the book reviews and longer pieces on literary and related subjects found on this web site, with links added in a few cases; capsule reviews of films are omitted, and this list is otherwise far from complete, especially regarding many more recent posts:
Review of A MOVEABLE FEAST (Bard Observer, September 1964)
Review of THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (Bard Observer, May 1966)
“I Missed It at the Movies: Objections to ‘Raising KANE’” (Film Comment, Spring 1972)
Review of JEAN RENOIR: THE WORLD OF HIS FILMS (Film Comment, January-February 1973)
Review of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW (Village Voice, March 1973)
“Raymond Durgnat” (Film Comment, May-June 1973)
Review of Dwight Macdonald’s DISCRIMINATIONS (Village Voice, Oct. 1974)
Review of Gore Vidal’s MYRON (Village Voice, Nov. 1974)
Review of Noel Burch’s THEORY OF FILM PRACTICE (Sight and Sound, Winter 1974/75)
On Jean Renoir [book review] (Film Comment, May-June 1976)
“Film Writing Degree Zero: The Marketplace and the University” (Sight and Sound, Autumn 1977)
Review of Noel Burch’s TO THE DISTANT OBSERVER (American Film, July-August 1979)
Review of Graham Greene’s DR. Read more
