Movie Love in the Fifties
By James Harvey. Alfred A. Knopf, 461 pages, $35.

The epigraph for James Harvey’s Movie Love in the Fifties is an excerpt from a 1998 conversation with the movie critic Pauline Kael that ends with the interviewer claiming, " When I’m at the movies, I feel like I’m swept up, lost, " and Kael, inimitably, replying, " I feel as if I’m found. " That’s an appropriate introduction to a book that turns out to be an unapologetically idiosyncratic exploration of some of the author’s favorite pictures. (The title is also a nod to Kael, whose final collection of her New Yorker reviews was called Movie Love.) But Harvey, whose 1987 Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, From Lubitsch to Sturges (Da Capo) was an astute and specific genre analysis, goes way beyond the license a generous reader might grant to an aficionado making a personal assessment of his experiences at the movies: it appears to have no organizing principle whatever. It’s not even about movie love in the ’50s, really, since roughly one-third of the space is given to lengthy descriptions of films released in the ’40s. For 75 pages in the center of the book — three and a half chapters covering Max Ophuls’s The Reckless Moment (1949), several pictures by Robert Siodmak (notably Christmas Holiday, 1944), and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (1941 and 1942), he barely even mentions the ’50s.

Harvey’s preferred methodology (which served him well in Romantic Comedy) is to move through a film, recounting scenes in detail, often assuming a slightly skewed perspective to illuminate its inner workings. Here, though, his responses are often baffling. Even if you know the picture he’s talking about, you may not recognize it, because he’s scrambled its meaning by shifting the proportions of its elements. And if he’s talking about a picture you haven’t seen, you may not be able to figure out what’s so special about the parts he chooses to emphasize. In Out of the Past, the song " The First Time I Saw You " is " played by the jazz band at the Negro club, by the string ensemble at Pablo’s place, by the record on Kathie’s phonograph, by the record on the jukebox, and so on, it’s everywhere, it seems " — which makes it pretty much like the theme song in every second movie released between World War I and Vietnam.

There are a few genuine insights. Harvey makes good observations about Hitchcock’s women, about Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, about the new audience for Rebel Without a Cause. And occasionally phrases caught my imagination: Hadda Brooks in In a Lonely Place has " a manner at once benign and remote " ; Bernstein’s anecdote in Citizen Kane about the girl on the ferry, a memory that, " being incommunicable in the end (who cares anyway?), only confirms our final aloneness. " My favorite is about Kim Novak as Madeleine in Vertigo: " It’s as if the stake she had in her own beauty were as uncertain and finally impersonal as the onlooker’s — something visited on her rather than fully possessed. "

But during the long waits between these glimpses of a true analytical intelligence, you can lose faith in both Harvey’s observations and his way of framing them. You can get lost in his rambling, apparently pointless paragraphs, in his convoluted diction, with its qualifications and contradictions, in prose that hasn’t been worked through with any attention to logic. By the time you get to the end of a section like the one on The Killing — " And although the Kubrick film is also filled with picturesque, lovable-type losers . . . they are as coldly viewed as the movie’s bad guys are. And they are, for the most part, enormously appealing . . .  " — you might be ready to bang your head against a wall.

Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me has " the confidence of both an unanswerable case and a great song. " Janet Leigh in Psycho has an " assured manner " that’s a " mixture of obeisance and condescension. " James Dean is as " spacily intent " as Ray Bolger in The Wizard of Oz, and his body is " as speaking and eloquent as his face. " Humphrey Bogart has a " gift for a kind of judicious doting. " Can anyone make sense of these phrases? Where were Knopf’s editors?

Issue Date: November 22 - 29, 2001

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