By Scott Ross
Note the First: I do not by any means claim that this list, which I am posting in installments, is either exhaustive or definitive. It’s merely obsessive, and highly personal. This is my list, based on my experience, my likes and prejudices, my self-education and my reading. Your list will differ wildly. I merely mean to celebrate, and to recommend, a few books that influenced me and that you might also enjoy.
Note the Second: Although the numbered list, when it is finished, is meant to add up to 100, I am going to fiddle outrageously with the totals. When within a particular category a writer has a number of titles, or a series of books, or I mention a volume by someone else on the same or a similar topic, I will count them all as one entry.
It’s my party, and I’ll cheat if I want to.
When I first began to get interested in movies as something other than a pleasurable pastime I was fortunate to do so in the midst of a veritable explosion of interest in old pictures (most of which were, I realize with a shudder, far younger then than I am now) and a concomitant plethora of books about these movies as the so-called “film generation” of the late 1960s began to publish. In early adolescence I began to buy some of these books, and many of them are still in my library. As with anything one discovers in youth, I retain an affection for many of the movie books I encountered then. Since they are all what I consider good books, I feel no need to apologize for their inclusion here. Most of the titles below do reflect the period of my autodidactic education in film, and my current preference for movies of the past over the seemingly computer-conceived, written, directed and performed inanities of this so far appalling century. I have lost interest in new movies generally, and not because I’ve become a cranky old man — I’ll have you know I was a cranky young man — but because movies, at least in America, alienated me (and, I suspect, legions of others) by their nearly complete capitulation to sequels, remakes, comic-book adaptations and idiot comedy, as well as their disinterest in anything recognizably human. (I dunno, Marge. He sounds cranky to me.) (Yeah? Well, in your hat, fellah.)
I. Actors
Since, generally speaking, even the most self-excoriating memoirs are suspect if only because it’s given to very few to express complete honesty about themselves, their experiences or their memories, I tend to prefer biographies. There too, of course, we are at the mercy of expectation, and all too often, hackery. Fortunately, there have been a number of excellent titles, in both biography and memoir and, for lack of a better term, celebration.
1. “Don’t Fall Off the Mountain” Shirley MacLaine (1970)
The first of MacLaine’s periodic memoirs was also the freshest; here was a simultaneously sincere and sardonic voice, describing not only her early struggles, her mother-of-all-clichés discovery by Hal Wallis, her important roles (she’s especially piquant concerning her unusual research for Irma La Douce) and her travels, particularly in Africa and Tibet. Among the highlights: The day she slapped the closet-case gossip columnist Mike Connolly.
See also: You Can Get There from Here (1975) in which MacLaine chronicles her trip to China to film the documentary The Other Half of the Sky.
My Lucky Stars (1996) MacLaine’s acute dissection of the people with whom she’s worked, including what at the time was arguably the most incisive depiction extant of the manic-depressive wonder that was Frank Sinatra. That one cost her a decades-long friendship.
2. Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films John Mueller (1985)
Mueller’s is that rare thing: A useful coffee table book. Its author analyses every one of Fred’s dances, whether solo, duet or ensemble, using multiple frames from the pictures for which Astaire created them to illustrate his descriptions. The insights are often superb and if you occasionally disagree with their author (as when he derides both Judy Garland’s affecting emotional reading of Irving Berlin’s “Better Luck Next Time” in Easter Parade, and the song itself) you can still enjoy the pictures, which so lovingly piece together the joys and intricacies of Astaire’s choreography.
A more recent, 25th anniversary edition from Zip Publishing reproduces the frames in far better quality, with those from Astaire’s color pictures now… er… in color.
3. Changing Liv Ullmann (1977)*
A terse, tart, poetic, beautifully written book by a demonstrably great film actress. She is open about her relationship with Ingmar Bergman, revealing about the ways Hollywood attempted to make her a conventional mainstream figure, and amusing about at least one of her co-stars (Charles Bronson). One of the finest such memoirs ever written, in part because for Ullmann, how she tells her story, and what she has to say about it, is as important as the events she recounts from it.
“I have attained one dream – and acquired ten new ones in its place.
“I have seen the reverse side of something that glitters.“
4. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book Arlene Croce (1972)
Although Pauline Kael in her New Yorker review quarreled a bit with some of Croce’s observations she also wrote, “I think it’s perfectly safe to say that this is the best book that will ever be written about Astaire and Rogers.” That may or may not be the case, but nothing I have read in the years since Croce’s book was published has even come close. The founder of Ballet Review magazine, Croce was for a quarter of a century the dance critic for the New Yorker, so she knew her apples. She was also a lively stylist; since reading this book 40-plus years ago I have been unable to watch the “Pick Yourself Up” dance in Swing Time without recalling what Croce wrote about the climax of it.
As with Astaire Dancing, Zip has also reissued this book with corrections by Croce and sharper frame reproductions.
5. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo: A Celebration of the Marx Brothers Joe Adamson (1973)
Speaking of published studies that haven’t been bettered, no analysis of the Marx Brothers has approached Adamson’s for breadth, intelligence, erudition or wit… although in 1973 he was pilloried for daring to be funny about the Marxes. This quintessential guide to the greatest of all comedy teams was, with The Marx Brothers Scrapbook (see below) my first exposure to Minnie’s boys, before I ever got to see one of their movies (Animal Crackers, in 1976) and the author’s quotations from the films, especially Groucho’s militantly anti-romantic dialogues with Margaret Dumont, made me weak from laughing. As a result of Adamson’s whetting my appetite for all things Marxist, I couldn’t wait to see the actual pictures, and if that is not the highest benefit of great writing about the movies, I’m not sure what is.
See also: Groucho Hector Arce (1979) The first biography of the Great Grouch, published just two years after his death, is still, somewhat shockingly, pretty much the only one of note. It’s both well researched and richly detailed; the author was an old friend of and ghost writer for Groucho, his book was authorized and he’d been working on it for years when his subject died.
Harpo Speaks! Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber (1961) Although its author makes too many sneering references to “fags” (not bad for someone who counted Alexander Woollcott as one of his best friends) Harpo’s book is for the most part as charming as the whimsical illustrations prepared for it by his beloved wife Susan.
Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends Charlotte Chandler (1978) A pleasant, wide-ranging collection of interviews with and about Groucho.
The Marx Brothers Scrapbook Groucho Marx and Richard J. Anobile (1973) Anobile, whose claim to minor fame was concocting books of frame enlargements with dialogue captions, got Groucho and a number of his friends to sit down for interviews, broken up with photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings and programs from the Marx Brothers’ stage shows and movies. The result was so interesting Groucho sued to stop publication, mostly over his own occasionally blue observations. Best example: The photo caption, for a group portrait of the cast of the Broadway Cocoanuts with a conspicuously empty chair at the center for Chico, who according to Groucho “was too busy fucking or playing pool.”
Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho’s House Steve Stoliar (1996) Vincent Canby described The Marx Brothers Scrapbook in his review of it as “funny, sad and revealing.” Stoliar’s memoir is all that and more. The young man who as a college student in the 1970s spearheaded the movement to get Universal to restore and reissue Animal Crackers came to work for Groucho as an archivist and stayed long enough to witness Marx’s companion Erin Fleming’s descent into narcissistic abuse, and Groucho’s own concomitant physical decline, undoubtedly hasted by Fleming’s increasing madness. He was still occasionally as sharp as ever: Toward the end when a nurse said she needed to see whether he had a temperature Groucho replied, “Don’t be silly. Everybody has a temperature.” I hear a movie is to be made of this book, with Geoffrey Rush as Groucho. (Hello, Academy nomination!) I’m sure the sale helped Stoliar’s bank account, but I hope the picture never happens. Why must we be confronted so frequently, not with great movie stars, but with facsimiles?
6. I.E., An Autobiography Mickey Rooney (1965)
I first got wind of this one in an admiring “movie book roundup” article in the late 1970s in the West Coast Review of Books and was surprised by how revealing it sounded of an actor I had scant knowledge of or opinion about beyond having moaned at his staggeringly insensitive caricature of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and enjoyed his “Let’s put on a show!” montage with Judy Garland in That’s Entertainment! So when a mass-market paperback met my eye in a second-hand book shop not long after, I snapped it up. There is something to be said for writing a memoir when you’re on your uppers; probably Rooney thought he had little to lose in letting down his hair, and although it’s been over four decades since I opened my copy there are a number of passages in it I recall without effort, such as Rooney’s comment on marriage to Ava Gardner (“The quality of [her] womanhood… had pinned me wriggling to a wall”) and L.B. Mayer’s throwing the studio’s one-time box-office savior bodily off the MGM lot for good. Years after reading his book I was unpleasantly surprised by the Rooney interviews in the Turner MGM documentary When the Lion Roared; I had been anticipating his reiterating his litany of complaints about the studio generally (and Mayer specifically) and was nonplussed by his mealy-mouthed, butter-wouldn’t-melt turnabout. Suddenly MGM was a wonderful place, no one at the studio ever hurt Judy Garland, and how dare anyone criticize it, or Mayer? I shouldn’t have been shocked, although I think I was right to be disgusted: This was the ageing Rooney speaking, the rediscovered Rooney, the post-Sugar Babies Rooney — the Rooney who was no longer a has-been but who had become an institution; naturally he had to defend his fellow institutions. While no one else can defend Rooney himself for Mr. Yunioshi, or indeed the young Mickey when he’s behaving almost like a feral Jerry Lewis prototype avant la lettre, like the little girl of fame, when he is good in a movie he is very good indeed. So is his book.
7. John Wayne’s America Garry Wills (1997)
I won’t say Wills’ magisterial study of the 20th century’s most popular American movie star changed my life. That would be absurd. It is, however, perhaps the most influential book about the movies I’ve ever read. It, and a weekend-long AMC film preservation festival of John Ford pictures about 20 years ago re-formed my ideas about Ford and Wayne, and indeed concerning the entire Western genre, about which I had been an appalling snob. My life has been considerably enriched since I invited these men and their movies into it, and I owe much to Wills’ book for relaxing my rigidity. He not only sees his subject plain, but with a fairness that is not sullied by ideological bent; books on Wayne prior to this one tended to be hagiographic, and written by either hacks or love-it-or-leave-it types, or both. Wayne for Wills is not the monolithic figure of rectitude favored by those who share the late movie star’s politics nor the hateful bugbear of left-liberalism but a man of strong gifts and beliefs, and equally strong contradictions and flaws. Wills brings a thoughtfulness to his subject that verges on, if it does not spill over into, genuine profundity.
8. The Laurel and Hardy Book Leonard Maltin, editor (1973)
This was the earliest movie book I ever purchased, at around age 12, and that copy is still in my collection. (And still in surprisingly good condition, all things considered). A nearly perfect pocket history of L & H, the book provides a complete filmography, including extensive lists of the dozens of shorts Stan and Babe made before their teaming, accounts of the filming of specific titles, and knowledgeable chapters celebrating the recurrent character actors (James Finlayson, Charley Chase. Arthur Housman, Charlie Hall) whose appearances were so indelible a part of Laurel&Hardyland. The Curtis Film Series was one of the happiest paperback events of the early 1970s, with, among other things, several titles written and/or edited by Maltin on child stars and character actors (The Reel Stars) as well as individual volumes on Boris Karloff, Don Siegel and Preston Sturges. About the only complaint one could lodge against the series was that the paper Curtis chose for it rendered the many photographs in each book notably fuzzy. (In the same period Curtis also produced mass market reprints, in conjunction with the Broadway musical olio Lorelei, of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes with, alas, poor facsimiles of Ralph Barton’s wonderful illustrations.) Naturally, the Curtis Film Series was a good thing that couldn’t last long; the publisher closed up shop in 1974.
See also: Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy: An Affectionate Biography of Laurel and Hardy John McCabe, Introduction by Dick Van Dyke (1966) The subtitle says it all. McCabe spent much of a lifetime researching and writing about L & H. He also established the international Sons of the Desert society for L&H aficionados. I don’t know how I neglected this lovely book on the first go-’round, but thanks to Eliot M. Camarena for the reminder!
Stan and Ollie: The Roots Of Comedy – The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy Simon Louvish (2001), which delves deeply into Stan’s extensive creative input, for better or worse, into the comedies he made with Babe Hardy.
9. Montgomery Clift Patricia Bosworth (1980)
Bosworth — her surname so appropriately close to Boswell — was an incisive, sympathetic biographer, which God knows Clift needed. She presents him in all his contradictory glory and effectively (if depressingly) limns Clift’s precipitous personal decline following his disfiguring 1955 automobile accident. For a man who from adolescence habitually stared at himself in mirrors, not merely in narcissism but apparently out of lust, losing his vaunted looks was a massive blow to Clift’s psyche. (Montgomery Clift makes it clear that, while Monty was bisexual, his chief attraction was to men.) That he was one of the most beautiful men ever to have been photographed by a movie camera is self-evident. That he brought a new style of acting to the screen, before Brando, and a remarkable sensitivity to his performances, has been largely forgotten. Bosworth reminds you why Clift was important.
See also: Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman (2011) Bosworth was a nearly lifelong friend to Fonda, and wrote what is, as far as I am aware, the most unflinching and honest portrait of her. Despite her having given some superb performances including what I maintain is the finest film portrayal of the last 50 years, the woman herself has long seemed to me confused to the point of needing professional help. Who else, in the turbulent 1960s, had to deliberately seek out a cause about which to concern herself (because everyone else had one) when they were practically growing on trees? Further, who, having finally decided on Vietnam as her cause, allowed herself to be manipulated into being photographed, laughing, with anti-aircraft machinery by the nation against which, whatever you think of that stinking conflict, her country was at war? Fonda’s family was practically the textbook example of dysfunctional, yet she has spent much of her life searching for a Daddy surrogate and marrying one after another. And while she considers herself a feminist, moreover, Fonda routinely pays the men who work for her more than the women. She is, in short, and for all her thespic gifts, exceptionally reactionary, even for Hollywood. Bosworth cannot tell you exactly why Fonda behaves as she does, but she gets the details down in all their painful prolificacy. After reading her book I still admire Jane Fonda the screen actress; I’d be a fool not to. But Fonda the woman sends shivers of despair up my spine.
10. Who the Hell’s In It: Portraits and Conversations Peter Bogdanovich (2004)
Forty years’ worth of appreciations of and interviews with several of the most durable of film stars, conducted by a man besotted by the movies. Although Bogdanovich could be repetitious (take a drink each time he writes that some couple or other “fell in love”) and a bit narrow-minded (no one he admired , even Cary Grant, could ever be anything other than absolutely heterosexual, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary) this is by and large a splendid collection.
See also: Pieces of Time: Peter Bogdanovich on the Movies (1973) A few of the chapters in Who the Hell’s In it appeared first in this smaller volume of Bogdanovich’s magazine writing and which includes a fascinating view of John Ford filming Cheyenne Autumn on location and a memorable interview with James Stewart in which the man I consider the finest of all American movie actors gave his interviewer his book’s title.
II. Animation
For nearly as long as I can remember, I have been under the spell of animated cartoons. As a child I was mad about them, more so than about any other form of filmed (or broadcast) entertainment, and much more so than anyone else I knew of my own age and weight. This extended to the comic books I also came under the thrall of even before I began to read on my own. I was an inveterate “funny animal” reader; Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny reprints, the Paul Murray Mickey Mouse and Goofy adventures and the Carl Barks duck stories were my meat, and the only humans who entered my comics universe were Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam, a few of the Harvey characters (and most of them were ghosts or imps) and, especially, the miraculous Little Lulu. I had no interest in superheroes then, and have little now.
But I see I’ve strayed from my text. Herewith a few of what I consider the best books on the animated cartoon.
11. The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons Jerry Beck (2010; reprinted 2020)
A terrific little book buttressed by hundreds of cell reproductions. You can argue with the choices, but fortunately the rankings are alphabetical rather than numerical. What’s Opera, Doc? isn’t the greatest cartoon ever made just because people keep saying it is; it’s not even the best Chuck Jones cartoon. But then, Citizen Kane isn’t Orson Welles’ best movie either, let alone the greatest ever made, and that pointless debate has gone on for decades.
My only real quarrel with Beck’s book: Why are the titles of these cartoon shorts listed as “Episodes”? Why don’t words mean what they mean any longer?
12. Bugs Bunny: 50 Years and Only One Grey Hare Joe Adamson (1990)
Adamson, one of the best things to happen to the study of classic movie comedy, turns his attention to the greatest of all cartoon stars. The book is not only beautifully laid out but wonderfully written, from its punning subtitle to the witty captions for the illustrations.
See also: Goofy: The Good Sport Walt Disney Studios (1985) Although this one suffers a bit from the way the studio was pushing “Sport Goofy” as a brand in the mid-’80s, it’s a nice little volume that pays tribute to my favorite animated cartoon character other than Bugs.
I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety Jerry Beck (1991) A nice volume on the adversarial team. Both characters were created, separately, by Bob Clampett, but redefined and put together by Friz Freleng for his peerless series of visual gag shorts.
13. Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist Chuck Jones (1989)
No creative artist has given me more pleasure throughout my life than Charles M. Jones. (Desert island cartoon: The Rabbit of Seville.) His thoughtfulness, erudition, wit and self-reflection made him a uniquely literary figure among animators. They could also overlard his later work with far too much philosophical verbosity. But these attributes were decided assets when he came to write his lavishly illustrated memoirs. Chuck Amuck was my favorite new book of its year, the volume I’d been pining for most of my life without knowing it.
See also: Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings Hugh Kenner (1994) This bright, intelligently written little monograph is a worthy addition to Jonesiana.
Chuck Redux: Drawing from the Fun Side of Life Chuck Jones (1996) Not as great a book as its predecessor, but well worth savoring.
14. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson (1984)
Two of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men” of animation, Thomas and Johnson were also best friends, next-door neighbors, beloved instructors for younger animators and authors of numerous informative books on the craft. This is their finest work, a rich, and richly illustrated, guide to Disney’s achievement. Thomas and Johnson (universally known at Disney as “Frank and Ollie”) were also masters at the art of character, or personality, animation; separately and together they were responsible for some of the loveliest sequences in feature animation: Ollie animated Smee in Peter Pan, the Stepsisters in Cinderella, Icabod Crane in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, King John in Robin Hood and, with Thomas, a great deal of The Jungle Book while Frank animated the dwarves weeping over Snow White’s coffin, Pinocchio’s performance of “No Strings on Me,” Cinderella‘s Stepmother, Captain Hook in Peter Pan, the wizard’s duel in The Sword in the Stone, Mary Poppins‘ dancing penguins, much of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet for the early featurettes and, supremely, the beautiful scene of Lady and Tramp eating spaghetti and exchanging an unexpected kiss. Whether evoking the movement of the natural world is or should be the ultimate goal of animation is highly debatable — Tex Avery’s cartoons don’t give a damn for reality, and there are none funnier — but there is no denying that the Disney artists in their full-length features approximated it better than anyone else. This treasurable volume shows you how.
While DVDs fall outside the purview of this survey, I also recommend the lovely 1999 documentary Frank & Ollie without reservation.
See also: Too Funny for Words: Disney’s Greatest Sight Gags Thomas and Johnson (1987) Thomas once recounted Walt at a story conference complaining, “You guys all think that the world is made up of gags! There isn’t one of you left who could write a lullaby or a love-affair romance in a picture, you all want gags, gags, gags!” Fortunately, most of those gags were good, many were brilliant and quite a few were masterful.
Treasures of Disney Animation Art Walton Rawls, ed. (1982) Not merely a quintessential coffee table book, but practically the size of a piece of furniture.
Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation John Canemaker (2001) A beautiful tribute, by a man who is not only an historian of the subject but an animator himself, of the master animators and animation directors on whom Walt relied, more and more as he became distracted by theme parks and other diversions: Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang (“Woolie”) Reitherman and Frank Thomas.
Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters: An Unauthorized Account of the Early Years at Disney’s Jack Kinney (1988) Kinney worked as an animator at the Walt Disney studios from 1932, eventually becoming the director of the great Goofy shorts (which no less an authority than Roger Rabbit called “genius”) in 1940. His book is a fascinating glimpse of the studio in its heyday, written with what one senses is a well-natured, and well-earned, bitterness: Kinney was offered the spot at MGM which Tex Avery eventually accepted, and was foolish enough to ask Walt’s advice about whether he should take it. Disney never forgave him for thinking about leaving. It took nearly 20 years but he finally edged Kinney out in 1958.
15. The Fleischer Story: A History of the Max Fleischer Cartoon Studio in the Golden Age of Film Animation, 1920-1942 Leslie Cabarga (1976; reissued 1988)
The first study of the Fleischers, by a writer and graphic designer who has become renowned for his own beautifully airbrushed Betty Boop art. From the silent Koko the Klown series Out of the Inkwell (revamped in the early 1960s and familiar to kids of my generation from TV syndication) to Betty to Popeye to the ill-advised feature pictures and Max’s horrific betrayal by Paramount which took everything he’d built up away from him forever. It’s all here, wonderfully illustrated and told with a sense both of excitement and regret.
16. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age Michael Barrier (1999)
There have been other overviews of animation, many of them with finer illustrations (see below) but none has had both the grasp of film history and developed sense of aesthetics Barrier displays in this tour de force volume. The author can be prickly, and more than a tick conservative, but this book, his superb critical study of Carl Barks and his marvelous overview Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books constitute a masterwork trilogy of rigorously intelligent popular history.
See also: Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation Charles Solomon (1989; Revised and Updated in 1994) A glorious brick of a book surveying the entirety of animation history to the early ’90s and bursting with beautiful illustrations, many in color.
Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation Reid Mitenbuler (2020) There’s very little that is either new or revelatory in this breezy chronicle, but it’s a very enjoyable (and, rara avis these days, well-written) concise history of the genre.
17. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons Leonard Maltin (Revised and Updated, 1980)
As a movie critic Maltin has been negligible. His taste tends to the middle-brow and, like a good liberal, he was slow to accept the emergence of serious movies by and about gay men and Lesbians. It is as a movie historian, therefore, that he has been of value, and this book is one of his finest, perhaps because (as with Joe Adamson) animation is clearly an abiding passion of its author. You’ll find here a survey of all the important animation studios and practitioners, from Winsor McKay to Ralph Bakshi, with complete filmographies for each, delicious illustrations, amusing captions and trenchant observations. This is one volume that belongs in every library of worthwhile movie books; when the revised edition appeared in 1980 I felt as if I’d been waiting for it my whole life.
See also: The Disney Films Leonard Maltin (1973; updated numerous times to 2000) A lively, well-illustrated critical guide, written with an historian’s knowledge and an enthusiast’s delight.
18. Pinocchio (Disney Editions Deluxe) Pierre Lambert (1997)
A dazzling visual portrait of my favorite animated movie. If I were forced, in some nightmare scenario, to keep only a single book on animation it would be this one. 236 glorious pages of backgrounds, sketches and finished cels. I hate even to acknowledge the existence of that degraded rag Entertainment Weekly (or, as it is known in my home, “EW!”) but this excerpt from the magazine’s review, posted on Amazon, sums the book up well: “[Lambert’s] exegesis of which artists did what… and of how their individual strengths were matched to particular characters and scenes… is invaluable. So is the fact that this book enshrines the fullest flowering of a medium increasingly overtaken by marketing concerns.”
See also: Pinocchio: The Making of the Disney Epic J.B. Kaufman (2015) More prosaic, and less lush, than Lambert’s book, but a thorough and respectable recounting of the making of a genuine animated masterpiece.
19. Tex Avery: King of Cartoons Joe Adamson (1975)
I owe my veneration of Tex Avery’s peerless MGM cartoons to a friend who videotaped and shared them with me in the early 1980s; due to the vagaries of syndication (and our family’s not having cable television after 1971) I had never seen them. I’m not sure I’d even heard Avery’s name at the time. Only animators, and hardcore animation fans, seemed to know who he was when Adamson wrote his, so far unequalled, appreciation. How he had time to interview Avery (and his best writer, Heck Allen — Mike Maltese to Avery’s Chuck Jones), see all the shorts, select his frame blow-ups and write this treasurable volume only two brief years after publishing Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, I can’t imagine. I will, however, be eternally grateful he did.
See also: “I Say, I Say… Son!”: A Tribute to the Legendary Animators Bob, Chuck and Tom McKimson Robert McKimson, Jr. (2012) A pleasant illustrated group biography on the least interesting of the six great Warner Bros. directors (the others were Avery, Freleng, Bob Clampett, Jones and, all too briefly, Arthur Davis) but one of its finest animators (Robert) as well as his gifted draftsman brothers (Chuck and Tom). Bob McKimson was often inspired, especially in his distinctive style, as an animator, of gesture. If his shorts as a director are less brilliant than those by Jones, Freleng and Clampett, he developed Foghorn Leghorn and Sylvester, Jr. (“Oh, father! How can I ever face the fellowth in Troop 12?”) and created Jack Warner’s favorite, the Tasmanian Devil. Doesn’t that just figure?
Now, can we please have a moratorium on the word “legendary” unless the subject under discussion is Mt. Olympus, the Nibelungenlied or King Arthur’s knights?
Animation: The Art of Friz Freleng — Volume One Friz Freleng and David Weber (1994) I have never understood why Freleng, whom Chuck Jones considered one of the two certified geniuses with whom he had worked (the other was Avery) is not spoken of with the same reverence as that which now routinely greets the name of Bob Clampett. I suspect on one level it’s because his work was considered conventional; Freleng was less concerned with exploring great graphic design or cinematic technique than he was in creating strong characters and explicating physical gags. Freleng’s comedic gags are of a consistently high order, even in his lesser cartoons, and his best work makes me laugh harder than almost anything other than Jones’ and Avery’s masterpieces. This two-volume, numbered and slip-cased set, signed by Freleng, includes an audio and a video cassette and is heaven for the Freleng fanatic. What makes Freleng so treasurable, as I see it, is his relentless logic. When he sets up an elaborate gag sequence, the payoff is both inevitable and surreal. One example of many, from the brilliant Bad Ol’ Puddy Tat: After being ingested by Sylvester, Tweety takes over his body, turning him into a train and, with perfect cartoon logic, crashes the cat straight into a brick wall.
Tex Avery: The MGM Years, 1942-1955 John Canemaker (1996) If Adamson’s Avery book has a liability it’s that none of his illustrations is in color. Canemaker’s lovely celebration redresses the balance.
While we’re on the subject, why is there only one great book on Avery and not a single title for Clampett? With our luck, when we finally get one it’ll be by John Kricfalusi.
20. That’s All, Folks!: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation Steve Schneider (1988)
The first important book on what are now collectively referred to as Looney Tunes, a beautifully illustrated and reasonably thorough tribute to some of the best, and funniest, cartoons ever made.
See also: Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald (1989) Although the entries are largely given over to recapping the plots of the hundreds of cartoons contained within, this is the only book of its kind to incorporate the totality of Warner cartoons. The titles are arranged chronologically and separate cross-referencing lists in the index group them according to characters. Bonus: The many vintage lobby cards reproduced as illustrations.
Warner Bros. Animation Art Will Friedwald and Jerry Beck (1997) A gorgeous coffee-table book compiled by two of the most reliable and intelligent chroniclers of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.
*Below, the state, both of capsule literary criticism in 2022 and of the damaged brains of 21st century readers. Alert the presses! A book published in 1977 is old. And not just old but “so so old.” Oh. Well, to Hell with it, then. And while we’re at it, the Hell with Liv Ullmann. How must the little nit who wrote this inane drivel react when confronted with a Dickens novel or a play by Euripides or a Bach cantata or the goddamned Venus de Milo?
I’m not sure which depresses me more: The “review,” or that two other Amazon customers actually found it “helpful.”
You people are really not giving me reasons enough to keep living.
Alaa younis
1.0 out of 5 stars It’s so so old!!!
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2019
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Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
1. Some Like it Hot (1959) My favorite movie, and arguably the funniest comedy made after the advent of sound. Billy Wilder and co-scenarist I.A.L. Diamond took an episode from a forgotten German comedy and expanded it into a breakneck farce that took in gangland massacres, sexual duplicity, homosexual implication and transvestitism, turning it into one of the cheeriest comedies in movie history. Marilyn Monroe, famously unreliable, is luminous — when she’s onscreen you can’t take your eyes off her. The only fault I can finds in Tony Curtis’ defining performance as an unrepentant heel is that, in the persona of “Josephine,” his falsetto was provided by Paul Frees. But it is Jack Lemmon, whooping it up as “Geraldine,” who gives the movie’s greatest performance. It’s so inspired it seems to have come (as Lemmon always claimed the character was anyway) from the moon. Lemmon was, and is, my favorite actor, and for all his fine work (in The Apartment, Irma La Douce, Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, “Save the Tiger,” The China Syndrome, Missing and Glengarry Glen Ross) I don’t think he was ever better than he is here. This is Billy Wilder’s ultimate masterpiece, the movie that summed up everything he could do without breaking a sweat. The great Joe E. Brown has the classic final line — which Wilder always claimed was written by Diamond, and vice-versa.
So few critics, so many poets 