Volume 29, Number 10 · June 10, 1982
Living Nightmares
By Michael Wood
Reverse Angle: A Decade of American Films
by John Simon
Clarkson N. Potter, 466 pp., $17.95
Fritz Lang in America fall)
by Peter Bogdanovich
Chelsea House, 143, 120 illustrations pp., $5.95 (a reprint of the 1967 Praeger edition; to be published in the (paper)
Hawks on Hawks
by Joseph McBride
University of California Press, 190 pp., $14.95
Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur, a Biography
by Barbara Leaming
Simon and Schuster, 220 pp., $15.50
The word 'art' rattles through John Simon's prose like an old sabre, often accompanied by condescension to the notion of entertainment—'adequate, simple-minded entertainment,' the 'tastefully designed bauble,' the 'solid bagatelle.' 'On occasion everyone appreciates a well-made piece of fluff' (the unhappy italics are Simon's). Art 'leaves us with insights, epiphanies, a climate of elation in which it is easier to breathe in the perennial problems, more possible to live with them according to our individual lights.' Simon believes in 'film as art, and in art as a form of humanism'; in a 'spiritual aristocracy' dedicated to the 'priorities of searching penetrancy and uncompromising effort to express the ineffable.'
Review, 3068 words
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