Volume 3, Number 10 · December 31, 1964
Spellbound
By Al Alvarez
Film: The Creative Process
by John Howard Lawson
Hill & Wang, 249 pp., $5.95
Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear
by John Russell Taylor
Hill & Wang, 380 pp., $7.95
Behind the Screen
by Kenneth Macgowan
Delacorte, 576 pp., $15.00
For the two worst years of my life I was theater critic for the New Statesman. On the average, I saw three shows a week, often five, sometimes more, and remember from all that welter only two occasions with pleasure: Oliver as Coriolanus, Mostel as Bloom. The rest is a vast and miserable smudge of boredom. At the end of my two years sentence I took a vow never voluntarily to go to the living theater again—except to see friends perform, or for money. Yet since childhood I have gone quite as often to the movies, still do, and can see no possible reason to stop. It is not a question of quality: at one point I developed a passion for bad films; it took me a long time to come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that bad films were not as good as I thought they were. Instead, it is a question of the kind of response the movies elicit.
Review, 2473 words
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