Assaultive Cinema: Andre de Toth at Columbia

My contribution to The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929-1959, edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht, and published this month to accompany the Locarno Film Festival’s retrospective curated by Ehsan.

It’s fitting that Andre de Toth’s spikey, achronological, and boisterously all-over-the-place autobiography of 1994 lacks an index and is entitled Fragments: Portraits from the Inside. Given his wanderlust, the somewhat splintered career it produced, and his resistance to being pinned down by the expectations of others, it’s hardly surprising that recognition of de Toth as an auteur arrived only belatedly, at least in the English-speaking world, decades after the publication of Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema. Among the recipients in Fragments’ two pages of “dedications” are his seven wives (one of whom was Veronica Lake) and nineteen children or stepchildren, adding to the burgeoning list of all the people, forces, and inclinations that subdivided him, leading to many paradoxes as well as some confusions.

De Toth’s boastful account of his Hungarian childhood largely consists of descriptions of both the schools he got expelled from and the pranks leading to each of his expulsions. From the outset, he establishes himself as someone who loves to tussle, with friends as well as adversaries. Read more