Last week I included Marcus Hearn’s latest book, The Hammer Vault: Treasures From the Archive of Hammer Films, in my two part list of Favorite Film Related Books of 2011. This week I got the opportunity to ask the author a few questions about his new book as well as discuss Hammer’s enduring legacy. The studio best known for its gothic horror films has continued to gain new fans and produce new movies including THE WOMAN IN BLACK, which is scheduled to be released in February of 2012.

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This is the second half of a two part list I’ve compiled featuring my favorite film related books of the year. As I mentioned in my previous post, a surprising number of good books were published in 2011. From lush coffee table gift books to intimate autobiographies, the range of interesting reading material I came across was both surprising and thought provoking so I thought I’d share some of the highlights. You can find the first part of my list posted here: Favorite Film Related Books of 2011 (Part I.)

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I enjoy reading about the movies I love almost as much as I enjoy watching them and this year I found myself doing a lot of reading. This was partially due to the fact that I’m more housebound lately but publishers were also very generous this year. I received many press releases as well as books for review during the last few months that caught my attention. Some books I encountered didn’t appeal to me but a surprising number of them kept me eagerly turning pages until I was finished reading. From lush coffee table gift books to intimate autobiographies, the range of interesting reading material I came across in 2011 was surprising, thought provoking and entertaining so I decided to compile a two-part list of my favorite film related books of the year. Some of the books on my list are fun and frivolous, while others are more weightier affairs. No matter what your reading tastes might be; these selections should appeal to all types of film fans.

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After the phenomenal success of VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (Marc Robson; 1967), Hollywood was eager to work with Jacqueline Susann again. Producers and studio executives didn’t have to wait long because the best-selling author quickly got to work on another novel, which was immediately optioned by Columbia Studios. The Love Machine was Susann’s third book and like Valley of the Dolls, it received plenty of negative press and lackluster reviews but that didn’t stop the enthusiastic public from buying it.

During Susann’s highly publicized writing career she used her experience in Hollywood as a would-be actress in the 1940s to write lurid tell-all novels that promised to shine a glaring light on the dark underbelly of stardom. Susann’s books avoided hot button issues like the war in Vietnam war and the growing civil rights movement while focusing on the glamorous and decadent lives of the rich and famous. These trashy tell-alls were more fiction than fact but they appealed to millions of readers who were eager for some escapist entertainment. When The Love Machine was released in 1969 it quickly became a bestseller and competed with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as well as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint for the number one position on the New York Times best-seller list before it was adapted for the screen in 1971.

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“In true travel, what matters are the magical accidents, the discoveries, the inexplicable wonders and the wasted time.” -Raúl Ruiz, paraphrasing Serge Daney in Poetics of Cinema

No director wasted time more spectacularly than Raúl Ruiz, who passed away last week at the age of 70. The restively prolific Chilean, who fled to Paris after Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power, made over 100 films, and was working on two at the time of his death (the Australian film journal Rouge compiled an invaluable annotated filmography through 2005). Obsessed with the multiplicative nature of storytelling, his work branched narratives, opened up parallel worlds and rendered dreams more real than reality. They often feel like a serial drama happening all at once, the plot twists layered one on top of the other in a dissolve or superimposition. Raised on robust American trash like Flash Gordon, Ruiz’s films are overflowing with wild incident (he later wrote scripts for the brash anti-realism of Mexican telenovelas). He embraced their  irruptions of logical narrative order, and also found delight in the “mistakes” of higher-budgeted productions :

For years I watched so-called Greco-Latin films (toga flicks, with early Christians devoured by lions, emperors in love, and so on). My only interest in those films was to catch sight of planes and helicopters in the background, to discover the eternal DC6 crossing the sky during Ben Hur’s final race, Cleopatra’s naval battle, or the Quo Vadis banquets. That was my particular fetish, my only interest. For me all those films, the innumerable tales of Greco-Latinity, all partook of the single story of a DC6 flying discreetly from one film to the next.

Ruiz always followed the plane, that is, he let the image determine the story, rather than vice versa. If a plane entered the frame, that dictated that a new tale had to be written: “It [the image-situation] serves as a bridge, an airport, for the multiple films that will coexist in the film that is finally seen.”

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You know this gaunt growler. He lurks in the disreputable direct-to-video section of your local video store, if it still exists, or pops up on Netflix in a low-budget creeper rated with one reluctant star. He is, of course, Lance Henriksen, a tireless worker and a real character of a character actor. In his wild, circuitous life he’s compiled a trunk-full of  anecdotes and chastened life lessons. With the help of co-writer Joseph Maddrey, he packed all of them into his autobiography, Not Bad For A Human. It lays bare his poverty-stricken youth and job-hustling acting career with a disarming lack of vanity and a rhythmic sense of cursing.

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On September 9, 1823 Mary Shelley wrote a letter to her friend and confident, the writer Leigh Hunt, in which she enthusiastically proclaimed, “But lo & behold! I found myself famous! Frankenstein had prodigious success as a drama & was to be repeated for the 23rd night at the English opera house.” Mary Shelley was referring to a play she had just watched titled Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake. It was based on her original novel, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, which was only moderately successful until Peake decided to adapt it for the stage. Mary’s letter to Hunt continued with, “The story is not well managed – but Cooke (the actor playing the nameless creature) played ___’s part extremely well – his seeking as it were for support – his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard – all indeed he does was well managed & executed.” While watching the latest stage adaptation of Frankenstein written by playwright Nick Dear and directed by the Oscar winning filmmaker Danny Boyle, I couldn’t help thinking of Mary’s letter and the initial excitement she must have felt while watching her creation brought to life. Like the doctor in her novel, I imagine that Mary Shelley must have been both proud of her accomplishment and somewhat surprised when she realized how little control she had over her own book. Frankenstein had become what it proposed. A wild and willful beast bound to no one and destined to haunt the memory of its creator, as well as audiences, for centuries.

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It’s taken as long as the caravan journey in The Big Trail, but we finally have a collection of film criticism from Dave Kehr, who currently writes the essential DVD and Blu-Ray column at the NY Times.  When Movies Mattered (University of Chicago Press) gathers his work from his period at the Chicago Reader, from 1974 – 1986. For years I’ve consulted his capsule reviews to guide my viewing habits, still available at the Reader website, but his long-form pieces have long been out of circulation. So this is a cause for celebration, although the resulting party would drive other critics to drink out of jealousy rather than selflessness. His prose is patient and lucid, laying bare stylistic and thematic mechanisms with the graceful invisible style of one of his favored Hollywood auteurs.

I was able to sit down with Mr. Kehr to talk about some of his favorite directors, as well as those not given much critical attention. So we range from Raoul Walsh to Godard and from Eastwood to Paul W.S. Anderson. Something for everyone! And it should be noted that the University of Chicago Press is doing an incredible job, releasing not just Kehr’s book, but also the most recent writings of Jonathan Rosenbaum and David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson.

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Under siege. John Ford’s Fort Apache established one of the major Cold War film archetypes, as J. Hoberman explains in An Army of Phantoms, his breathless, careening cultural history of the period (which the New Press released today). Covering the initial years of the political frost, from the mid-1940s through 1956, it’s the prequel to his 2003 The Dream Life, which ranged from 1960 to the release of Blow Out in 1981. He is preparing a third volume, Found Illusions: The Romance of the Remake and the Triumph of Reaganocracy, that will cover the rest of the 80s and the end of the Cold War. His stated inspiration is Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, and Hoberman’s less deterministic project will likely cozy up to it on film reference shelves in the coming decades as an essential and idiosyncratic work of cultural studies.

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