Film book reviews: Some reel screen gems

THE four most engrossing film books this Christmas are a mixed bag.

Robert Sellers’s Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down (Preface, £18.99) is a highly partial but persuasive account of how a tranche of working-class lads “Connery, Caine, Richard Harris, Robert Shaw”revolutionised and reinvigorated Sixties cinema (pictured, Connery and Shaw in From Russia With Love). It’s pacy and well-written, bar the occasional infelicity (“Finney literally exploded as an actor”).

Jason Zinoman makes a similarly compelling case for the effect that Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin and others had on popular culture by reinventing the horror film from the Sixties onwards, in Shock Value (Duckworth, £18.99). He also tells us that Dan O’Bannon came up with the idea of a creature bursting out of John Hurt’s stomach in Alien because he suffered from agonising bowel problems caused by undiagnosed Crohn’s disease.

Garry Mulholland takes a looser approach to genre in Stranded at the Drive-In (Orion, £12.99). His personal selection of “the 100 best teen movies” includes not just Pretty in Pink, East of Eden et al, but The 400 Blows, Made in England and Fish Tank, and he argues for the depiction of awkward teenage years as the most significant postwar force in film. Hmm, perhaps. But as with his previous list books, Mulholland’s combination of idiosyncratic analysis, scattergun prose and sheer enthusiasm makes this more than the sum of its parts.

Finally, Philip French’s I Found It at the Movies (Carcanet, £18.95) is an apparently random but charming collection from nearly 50 years as the Observer film critic. These pieces are elegant and learned, and they hark back to the era when French’s predecessor, CA Lejeune, could dismiss the mawkish home-front drama Millions Like Us with three words: “And millions don’t”.

Elsewhere, as usual, it’s all overlong or redundant biographies and coffee-table tomes. Has ever a family discussed its own dysfunctions so openly and endlessly as the Fondas, especially Jane? Patricia Bosworth’s hefty new biography of her contemporary and sort-of-friend Jane Fonda (Robson Press, £20) is hamstrung by the fact that every scene in the actress’s transformation from sexpot to activist to workout queen to trophy wife has been acted out in public. What’s more, the juicier elements ” – the queasy relationships with dad Henry and brother Peter, the bulimia and promiscuity, the bisexual threesomes with husband Roger Vadim – were dealt with in Fonda’s autobiography My Life So Far. Strangely, here as elsewhere, the extraordinary life of the woman who provoked so much desire and revilement seems inert and insipid. Fonda really does make the heart grow absent.

A similar problem faces Peter L Winkler, in that his subject, Dennis Hopper (Robson Press, £18.99), spent his entire life telling anyone who would listen about his demons. This is a fluent recapitulation of the drink and the drugs and the womanising, the yearning for high art and the years slumming it in trash. All the old stories about James Dean, Easy Rider and the extraordinary sluttiness of Natalie Wood are duly ticked off, though I’m sad that Winkler leaves out Hopper’s claim that, dangerously off his face while shooting Mad Dog Morgan in Australia in 1974, he was banned not only from driving but also from being a passenger in a car.

Hopper’s volatile talent and the raw edge of his madness at least make him interesting. Marc Eliot’s bluntly written Steve McQueen (Aurum, £20) makes clear that McQueen’s laconic, ungiving projection of onscreen cool masked the fact that he was a massive shit and boring as hell. Diane Keaton’s memoir Then Again (Fourth Estate, £18.99), meanwhile, shows her to be just as loopy and actressy as you would expect. This book is not, however, a self-serving star’s survey of her life and career, but a touchingly scatty meditation on the family that made her what she is, from her current viewpoint as an older mother of two adopted children. Keaton’s own bulimia, and her affairs with Woody, Beatty and Pacino (who “didn’t relate to tables”, apparently) are deftly sketched in almost as asides.

Monsters in the Movies (Dorling Kindersley, £25) is an agreeably trashy pictorial anthology of vampires, zombies, robots and aliens, apparently chosen and captioned by John (American Werewolf in London) Landis, and interspersed with his larky interviews with horror luminaries. Finally, there’s Cult Movie Art (Titan, £24.99), a series of disturbing paintings inspired by films from Pulp Fiction to A Clockwork Orange to Donnie Darko, culled from the annual Crazy 4 Cult show at LA’s Gallery 1988. The foreword is by director Kevin Smith, who glories in the sight of popular culture eating and regurgitating itself.