Volume 35, Number 12 · July 21, 1988
Free Spirits
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges
by James Harvey
Knopf, 716 pp., $35.00
There is a secret history of Hollywood that must remain largely unwritten; the story not of the on-screen or off-screen careers of the movie stars, but of their phantasmal afterlives in the minds of their audiences. Manuel Puig's novel Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, with its vision of Hollywood gestures and plot structures seeping into the life of a movie-mad Argentinian town, represents only one of the potentially infinite possibilities. Film books these days, with their emphasis on semiotic codes and quantitative analysis, tend to reduce moviegoing to a rather impersonal experience, as if we brought nothing to our encounters with the screen and emerged from the dark imprinted with precisely identical patterns. If it were all that predictable, cinema would be as airless a business as the common run of academic studies manages to make it seem.
Review, 2716 words
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