Volume 20, Number 19 · November 29, 1973
Movie Crazy
By Michael Wood
GWTW: The Making of "Gone With The Wind"
by Gavin Lambert
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 238 pp., $7.95
The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane
by Pauline Kael
The Citizen Kane Book: The Shooting Script
by Herman J. Mankiewicz, by Orson Welles
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 440 pp., $4.95 (paper)
"Casablanca," Script and Legend
by Howard Koch
The Overlook Press, 223 pp., $7.95
More About "All About Eve"
by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Random House, 357 pp., $7.95
The Magic Factory: How MGM Made "An American in Paris"
by Donald Knox
Praeger, 217 pp., $9.95
The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book
by Arlene Croce
Dutton, 191 pp., $9.95
Broken empires, scattered dynasties. Hollywood always loved nostalgia, and Gone With The Wind was a better title than anyone knew. Early Egypt, ancient Rome, the gracious old American South cropped up so often and so appealingly in Hollywood movies because they were an gone, taken by Time's fell hand. The flashback in the Forties and Fifties was not really a narrative device at all but a compulsion, the instrument of a constant, eager plunging into the past. A slow, misty dissolve, and off we went into the day before yesterday, when things were different; into a time before all this (whatever all this might be in any given movie) happened to us.
Review, 4153 words
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