Review: 'The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema's Most Influential Filmmakers'

The auteur theory tends to get overstated when examining the very collaborative art of filmmaking. Nevertheless, the most distinctive directors do tend to have the final say when it comes to the look and philosophy of the films they manage. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of cinema could identify a film that, say, Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, or Steven Spielberg directed from just a single carefully selected still frame. Other very famous directors, such as Robert Wise and Billy Wilder, are less identifiable by visual style than they are by point of view (Wise: optimistic; Wilder: pessimistic). Plus, directors have flashy jobs that require a certain gregariousness, or at least a big mouth. Hunching over a typewriter like Robert Towne or adjusting a lens like Gregg Toland is not as attention-getting as DeMille shouting through a megaphone in his jodhpurs.

Sloan De Forest's new book The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema's Most Influential Filmmakers celebrates these most celebrated people to work behind the cameras. Like other volumes published in Turner Classic Movies' series of film studies, The Essential Directors consists of short entries each with a bit of background history, a bit of critical assessment, a few recommendations for representative works, and lots and lots of fabulous photos. More so than the series' volumes on horror films and summer movies I've reviewed here on Psychobabble, The Essential Directors refuses to rock the boat too much with its selections, mostly only straying from the household-name canon to acknowledge that white men didn't always helm movies with entries on Oscar Micheaux, Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, and Elaine May. Consequently, those are among the book's most interesting and informative entries. De Forest could have diversified his selection a lot more if he did not limit himself to directors who worked in Hollywood before 1975, but I guess that would have been outside the scope of TCM's programming.

Review: 'The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films'

Hammer Film Productions made more than 160 movies, about a third of which were the horror flicks that earned the company its looming reputation. With so many films and so many producers, directors, and writers who helped Frankenstein them to life, Hammer is well deserving of a monstrous encyclopedia like the one Chris Fellner is about to publish.

The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films is exactly what the title describes. Fellner’s tome supplies more than 525 pages of entries on the expected movies and crew members, as well as entries on Hammer’s forays into television, such as The Hammer House of Horror, and even some items with a somewhat tangential relationship to the production company, such as Blood of the Vampire (a non-Hammer production made by a crew with deep ties to Hammer) and Ida Lupino, whose husbands and father worked for Hammer and who played house-host to Hammer’s number-one star, Peter Cushing.

Entries on films each follow a similar format with subheadings listing cast and crew and UK and U.S. release dates, summarizing plots in great detail, offering quotes from critics and cast/crew members (Christopher Lee’s quotes are almost invariably about how he wasn’t being paid enough), and tersely running down production notes and trivia, some of which are quite interesting (I had no idea that Cary Grant was a major Hammer-head who almost starred in Phantom of the Opera in 1962). That terseness prevents this book about fun films from being truly fun. It would have been nice if Fellner took a more playful and less drily encyclopediac approach to composing his encyclopedia. He only drops his dry professionalism when discussing the so-called “Hammer Glamour” actresses for which the studio is famous. While the way Fellner leers over these actresses is technically appropriate in a book about a studio infamous for the way it exploited its female stars, it can make for uncomfortable reading in 2019, especially when the author does such unnecessary things as relaying certain actresses’ measurements. A book about the sixties does not have to read like a book written in the sixties.