Vaughan Edwards

ALL’S WELLES THAT ENDS WELLES Another book about Orson Welles? Why? With very good reason as it happens. Unlike most previous biographies, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles? by Joseph McBride focuses on the last fifteen years of the great director’s life, from his return to Hollywood in 1970 after a long exile in Europe, until…

BLAZING FRANKENSTEIN! Fifty years old this year, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein remain at the top, or close to the top, of everyone’s list of Best Comedy Movies. There are many other titles on those lists, so why has Bruce G. Hallenbeck limited himself to just those two? The answer is simple – apart from…

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? NOT MUCH I’ll begin as author David Curtis does, with a quotation from Elizabeth Bowen: “I go to the cinema for any number of different reasons: At random, here are a few of them: I go to be distracted (or ‘taken out of myself’); I go when I don’t think; I go…

CELLULOID CULTURE SHIFTERS In his recent history, A Chronology of Film, Ian Haydn Smith brilliantly gave us a wide-ranging picture of worldwide cinematic development from its inception until the present day. In his new book FilmQuake: The Most Disruptive Films in Cinema  he sets himself an even more daunting task; he limits himself to examining fifty…

ART FOR ARTHUR’S SAKE It all started in 1485. In Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory gathered the tales of King Arthur and his knights into a single work for the first time. As luck would have it, this coincided with the invention of the printing press, making Malory’s book one of the first ever…

HELD TO RANSOM! Before reading Eve Golden’s exuberant biography, what little I knew of Anna Held came from the 1936 biopic The Great Ziegfeld and the 1980 Broadway musical Tintypes. The Anna of the film appears to be a relatively accurate portrayal, somewhat marred by Luise Rainer’s relentlessly winsome (albeit Oscar-winning) performance. Tintypes dismisses Held…

LEIGHWARD “A consummate actress, hampered by beauty” is how George Cukor, the original Gone with the Wind director, described Vivien Leigh. Leigh is almost unique among movie stars (a label she detested) in that she was as celebrated on the stages of London and New York as on the cinema screens of the world. Best…

VITAL VITAGRAPH This is the story of two motion picture pioneers, but their names are not Griffith, Chaplin, or any of the usual suspects found in the history books. J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith were prime movers in the film world of their time, but are forgotten today, mainly because others who came…

HARDLY AN AVERAGE JANE The Hollywood Golden Age biography market is glutted with studies of Crawford, Davis, Dietrich, Hepburn, Hepburn, Monroe, Taylor and their peers. Is there anything left to say about these fabled creatures? The answer in most cases is a resounding “No!” Consequently, many writers are now exploring less well-trodden paths, and it’s…

A BUST OF PERSONALITY “Ladies and Gentlemen, here they are, Jayne Mansfield.” Talk-show host Jack Paar allegedly paid his writer Dick Cavett $5,000 for that line and it pretty much says it all. He was of course referring to Ms. Mansfield’s celebrated twin assets, but as Eve Golden reveals in this ferociously readable biography, there…

THE HISTORY OF CINEMA IS A HISTORY OF US In A Chronology of Film, Ian Haydn Smith takes on the history of Cinema (and incidentally the history of the world) from the late nineteenth century to the present.   As befits the recounting of a primarily visual medium, the book is a visual treat with a…