Matinee Idylls: Reflections on the Movies - Softcover

Schickel, Richard

3.25

8 ratings by Goodreads

9781566633185: Matinee Idylls: Reflections on the Movies

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566633184 ISBN 13: 9781566633185

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 2000

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Some of the movies’ greatest figures, some of the most important issues raised by the medium, come under close, highly personal, and deeply informed reflection in this new book by one of our most prominent and influential critics. Readers of Time magazine have been familiar with Richard Schickel’s film reviews for many years; but the pieces in Matinee Idylls are more often about the movie past than the movie present. Mr. Schickel seizes the opportunity here “to delve into less pressing matters, to try to put careers and issues into some kind of perspective, to see a body of work or an aspect of the movie past with a fullness that journalistic rounds don’t permit.” The result is a wonderfully intelligent and entertaining collection, with subjects ranging from Garbo to Fellini, and stops in between for Bette Davis, Frank Capra, Charles Laughton, Sam Fuller, and many others, and the exploring of such matters as censorship, celebrity power, and the current crisis in narration. Witty, passionate, independent in his judgments, and a compulsively readable stylist, Mr. Schickel has made Matinee Idylls a book that everyone who cares about the movies will want to read and reread.

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Review:

By his own reckoning, Richard Schickel sits in an interesting place in movie history, between the geezers who still recall falling under D.W. Griffith's spell and the current crop of cinephiles who dig the wrong parts of the past--Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, say, rather than his delirious All That Heaven Allows. It's a clever distinction, and its brothers and sisters are everywhere in Matinee Idylls. The author of a small library of books about movies and moviemakers, a producer of television documentaries, and Time's longtime cinema guy, Schickel's authority on movie history is evident in these pieces gathered from 1984 to the present. Whether taking on stars (Bette Davis, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier), directors (Frank Capra, Sam Fuller, Satyajit Ray), or trends (the halcyon '50s and '60s when Americans watched foreign films), Schickel shows us what is fractured, forgotten, misunderstood, or just not gotten by audiences about his subjects. Frank Capra, he reminds us, regularly saw, and put into his pictures, the sweetness and the menace of ordinary folk. Greta Garbo's dwindling stock is regrettable but understandable: her star vehicles were dead things that mostly reflected her ego. Sam Fuller? He was a "movie bozo" who could still charge his screen with "the shock of the transgressive." Writing in a cool rather than a hot style, Schickel's draw is cumulative. At last, he seems the best kind of critic, armed with a fan's love, infinite knowledge, and a calm, unwavering eye. --Lyall Bush

About the Author:

Richard Schickel is a film critic for Time magazine and an often-honored critic of the cinema. His many books include biographies of Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando, James Cagney, D.W. Griffith, Cary Grant, and Walt Disney, as well as The Men Who Made the Movies, His Picture in the Papers, and Intimate Strangers. He lives in Los Angeles.

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