Warning shadows : home alone with classic cinema

In his illuminating new work, Gary Giddins explores the evolution of film, from the first moving pictures and peepshows to the digital era of DVDs and online video-streaming. New technologies have changed our experience of cinema forever; we have peeled away from the crowded theater to be home alone with classic cinema. Recounting the technological developments that films have undergone, Warning Shadows travels through time and across genres to explore the impact of the industry's most famous classics and forgotten gems. Essays such as "Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!," "Edward G. Robinson, See," and "Prestige and Pretension ( Pride and Prejudice )" capture the wit and magic of classic cinema. Each chapter--ranging from the horror films of Hitchcock to the fantastical frames of Disney--provides readers with engaging analyses of influential films and the directors and actors who made them possible.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Critic Giddins (Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Miracles) gleans fresh insights from novel juxtapositions in these essays drawn from his newspaper reviews of DVD collections. The DVD collection's raison d'etre is to group movies around organizing principles, which here run the gamut from Hitchcock retrospectives to Disney nature docs to Hollywood literary adaptations to charming oddities like a collection of silents starring Harry Houdini. The downside to reviewing them is that Giddins must glance at lesser works with little to recommend them, though he'll often notice a fine performance, catchy score or radiant lighting scheme gleaming through the dross. The payoff is the themes that emerge as he sifts a wealth of comparisons and contrasts. These range from the failings of Rodgers and Hammerstein (The Sound of Music is "the happiest of all musicals involving Nazis") to keen evocations of a movie star's aura, the "casually authoritative stance" of an Edward G. Robinson or the "mulish twisting between bashful affability and cries de coeur" of a Jimmy Stewart. Giddins is the ideal couch companion, erudite but relaxed and witty; his perceptive commentary shows that it's not what you watch, it's how you watch it. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Although best known as the Village Voice's longtime jazz critic, Giddins commands pop-culture expertise beyond music. Recently he's been writing reviews of DVD releases of classic films for the New York Sun. As Giddins notes and the collection's subtitle suggests, despite having become society's default viewing method, DVD and Blu-ray . . . remain substitutes for the intended experience ; the book's dedication to some three-dozen defunct New York theaters affirms that his heart remains in the movie house. Although new assessments of decades-old releases inherently lack the immediacy and relevance of reviews of current works, they allow Giddins to offer well-considered views of classics both vintage (The General, King Kong) and modern (Blade Runner) and of celebrated directors like Ford, Hawks, and Lubitsch. He tackles some relative obscurities as well, from a collection of German Expressionist silents to foreign masterworks by Lech Majewski and Peter Watkins. The collection may not be as valuable as Giddins' award-winning jazz writings, but it's a worthwhile read for movie lovers as well as a useful buying guide.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2010 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

SCRATCH a film critic, and you're likely to find a jazz buff. That the opposite is also true was suggested as far back as the 1930s by Otis Ferguson, the startlingly prescient critic who covered jazz, when it was a genuinely popular art, along with Hollywood movies, then entering their classical phase, for The New Republic. It's demonstrated again by Gary Giddins, the eminent jazz critic of The Village Voice from 1973 to 2003, and more recently the DVD columnist of The New York Sun (which ceased publication in 2008). A collection of Giddins's film columns for The Sun, filled out by work for other publications, including DGA Quarterly (a journal from the Directors Guild of America) and The New York Times Book Review, has been published under the alarming title "Warning Shadows; Home Alone With Classic Cinema," which somehow conjures a 1970s baby sitter watching "The Late Show" while waiting for the neighborhood slasher to show up. The book itself is considerably cozier: an anthology of informed, engaged, illuminating writings, mainly concerned with American movies of the '30s, '40s and '50s. A sensitive critic of jazz needs both a familiarity with basic forms and genres and a special responsiveness to the often minute changes worked on that primary material by the individual artist. Similar skills are needed to decode the genre-based films of high Hollywood: just as it helps to know Ray Noble's version of "Cherokee" to understand what Charlie Parker does with it, an understanding of John Ford's plangent social westerns brings out the particular qualities of Anthony Mann's neurotic, fiercely subjective variations on many of the same basic characters and situations. Giddins does just that in essays included here, considering Ford in extended reviews of boxed sets of his work from Warner Brothers and Fox, and Mann through Criterion's handsome edition of "The Furies" (1950) and Universal's scattershot releases of Mann's James Stewart westerns. "The 1950s were arguably the greatest years of the western," Giddins writes in his Mann essay, "the period in which generic formulas were at once sustained and destabilized through psychology, revisionism, high style and the kind of grandeur that follows when the most durable clichés are refrained against classical paradigms." To sustain and destabilize - that's as good a definition of the Hollywood filmmaker's function as it is of the jazz musician's, and Giddins expands on it through vivid discussions, not just of directors (Lubitsch, Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles) but of those extraordinary stars who were forceful enough to become the auteurs of many films in which they appeared (Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, Boris Kartoff ). Not surprisingly, Giddins excels when his interests coincide, as in his original observations on the series of films that the veteran director Michael Curtiz ("Casablanca") created around his young discovery, the big-band singer Doris Day; the nostalgic show-business musicals of Bing Crosby (the subject of a biography by Giddins); and the samba-driven propaganda films ("Saludos Amigos," "The Three Caballeros") that Walt Disney produced on behalf of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy. Giddins cedes some authority with foreign films, giving far too wide a pass, for example, to Alain Robbe-Grillet's bondage fantasy "La Belle Captive" (1983) by linking it to Alain Resnais's rigorously mysterious "Muriel" (1963). And the collection doesn't entirely escape the forced contingencies of deadline journalism: "William Wyler's 'Ben-Hur' (1959) and Nicolas Roeg's 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' (1976) are oddly companionable," Giddins writes, more hopefully than persuasively, as he introduces a column reviewing them both. But over all this is a graceful and stimulating book, one that opens a door on an art that is, like jazz, both popular and esoteric, collective and intensely personal, immediately accessible and endlessly intricate. Dave Kehr writes about movies for The Times and other publications.

Choice Review

Giddins is one of the US's most respected cultural critics. His jazz column "Weather Bird" ran for a long time in The Village Voice, and he has written books on Charles Parker, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and other major jazz figures. He is also one of the nation's most perceptive film critics. The first section of this book comprises short essays on the changing nature of the moving image in the 21st century; the second and third sections offer more than 60 essays on the films of key directors, including Howard Hawks, William Wellman, John Brahm, Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, Edward Yang, and many others. Considering films in every possible genre--biopics, comedies, musicals, literary adaptations, crime/noir films, war films, fantasy and horror films--Giddins treats El Cid, King Kong, Blade Runner, I Wake Up Screaming, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Lust for Life, Pete Kelly's Blues, and others too numerous to mention. This is film criticism of the first rank: accessible, intelligent, and informed. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. W. W. Dixon University of Nebraska--Lincoln

Ernst LubitschHoward HawksWilliam A. WellmanMr. Arkadin

Acknowledgments	p. 13
Part 1 Home Alone With Classic Cinema	p. 15
You Pays Your Money	p. 17
Peeping	p. 18
Screening	p. 21
Televising	p. 24
Digitizing	p. 26
Laughter and Tears	p. 29
Part 2 Directors and Stars	p. 35
1 Touched	p. 37
2 The John Ford Code	p. 42
Ford at War	p. 42
Ford at Fox	p. 48
3 Three	p. 52
4 Frank Capra, True Believer	p. 57
5 Guilty: Alfred Hitchcock	p. 63
6 That Wild So-and-So	p. 69
7 The Orson Welles Dilemma	p. 74
After Kane	p. 74
The Trouble	p. 78
Dark Knight	p. 82
8 John Brahm: The Evil That Men Do	p. 86
9 Michael Curtiz's Doris Day Period	p. 90
10 Anthony Mann of the West	p. 94
11 Sam Fuller's Pulp Cinema	p. 101
12 Akira Kurosawa's Deep Focus	p. 106
Olympian	p. 106
Red Harvests	p. 110
13 Medieval Ingmar Bergman: God Is in the House, Maybe	p. 114
14 Sergio Leone: Heroes, Villains, and Idiots	p. 122
15 Sidney Lumet's Family Plots	p. 127
16 The Magical Unreality of Lech Majewski	p. 135
17 Edward Yang's Family Ties	p. 140
18 Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!	p. 144
19 Joan Crawford Is Dangerous	p. 148
20 Bette Davis, Bigger Than Life	p. 152
21 The Serenity of Alice Faye	p. 156
22 Edward G. Robinson, See	p. 161
23 Humphrey Bogart: Falcons and Fascists	p. 167
24 Let's Be Frank	p. 171
25 James Stewart: No More Mr. Nice Guy	p. 176
26 Boris Karloff: He's Alive!	p. 180
Part 3 Movies by Genre	p. 185
Biopics	p. 187
27 A Legend in His Own Mind (El Cid)	p. 187
28 Lust for Lives (Young Mr. Lincoln/Lust for Life)	p. 192
29 Felonious Munch (Edvard Munch)	p. 197
30 Hitler's Magic Flute (Hamsun Hunger)	p. 202
Fantasy/Horror	p. 206
31 Early German Psychos (German Expressionism Collection)	p. 206
32 It Wasn't Beauty Killed the Beast (King Kong/Grass/Chang)	p. 210
33 Masters and Grandmasters (The Thief of Bagdad/Icons of Adventure)	p. 214
34 Urban Legend (Blade Runner)	p. 218
35 Carnivores (Dark Sky Films)	p. 222
Comedy	p. 226
36 Running for a Train (The General)	p. 226
37 Road Warrior (Trafic)	p. 230
Literary Adaptations	p. 234
38 Prestige and Pretense (Pride and Prejudice)	p. 234
39 An Unhappy Film in Its Own Way (Anna Karenina)	p. 238
40 Classics and Semi-Classics Illustrated (Literary Classics Collection)	p. 242
41 A Rosetta Stone for the 1950s (Ben-Hur/The Man Who Fell to Earth/Bad Timing)	p. 246
42 John Huston's Novel Approach (Under the Volcano)	p. 250
43 Lights! Camera! Talk! (Tennessee Williams)	p. 254
44 Maxiseries (A Dance to the Music of Time/Fabio Montale)	p. 259
Musicals	p. 263
45 Who's Afraid of Al Jolson? (The Jazz Singer)	p. 263
46 Pennies from Heaven (The Threepenny Opera)	p. 267
47 Habit Forming (The Busby Berkeley Collection)	p. 271
48 Smilin' Them to Death (Hallelujah/The Green Pastures/Cabin in the Sky)	p. 275
49 Vaudeville (Bing Crosby: Screen Legend Collection)	p. 279
50 Techni-glory (The Tales of Hoffman/Rodgers & Hammerstein/Gregory Hines)	p. 282
51 Casting Doubts (Fiddler on the Roof/Presenting Lily Mars)	p. 287
52 How Jazzed Can You Get? (Passing Through/A Great Day in Harlem/Blues in the Night/Pete Kelly's Blues)	p. 291
The Scene	p. 291
Lost and Found	p. 295
Group Portrait	p. 298
Mining the Misery	p. 301
The Disney (And Anti-Disney) Version	p. 304
53 Battling Nazis with Sambas (Saludos Amigos/The Three Caballeros)	p. 304
54 Dog Days (Lady and the Tramp/Hayao Miyazaki/Max and Dave Fleischer)	p. 308
55 Uncle Walt's Prairie Home Companion (True-Life Adventures)	p. 314
Crime/Noir	p. 318
56 Men Without Molls (Gangsters Collection, Vol. 3)	p. 318
57 Elementary (Charlie Chan/Michael Shayne)	p. 323
58 To Coin a Genre (Kino's Film Noir)	p. 328
59 New Grubb Streets (Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4)	p. 333
60 The Deadly Forties (I Wake Up Screaming/When Strangers Marry)	p. 337
61 Who Is Harry Lime? (The Third Man)	p. 343
62 Joker (Ace in the Hole)	p. 347
63 Salvage Jobs (Affair in Trinidad/The Garment Jungle)	p. 351
64 Mob Mentality (Mafioso/Excellent Cadavers)	p. 355
War/Agitprop	p. 359
65 Wars to End Wars (All Quiet on the Western Front/49th Parallel)	p. 359
66 Love the Warriors (Overlord/The Guns of Navarone/The Caine Mutiny)	p. 363
67 Theater of the Absurd (Merrill's Marauders)	p. 367
68 In Search of Lost Time (Muriel/La belle captive)	p. 371
69 A Soviet Guide to Cuba (I Am Cuba)	p. 375
70 The Redmen Are Coming (Indianerfilmes)	p. 379
71 Recalling the Future of Nuclear War (The War Game/Culloden)	p. 383
Index	p. 387

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