Even better than me

Julie Burchill

IF YOU'RE TALKING TO ME YOUR CAREER MUST BE IN TROUBLE: MOVIES, MAYHEM AND MALICE by Joe Queenan Picador, £5.99, pp. 267 Joe Queenan is the funniest writer in America. Now you might think that that's like calling someone the prettiest girl in Turkey — not that much of a compliment. But there's more: he's very probably the funniest writer in the world. Including England. Nasty books about Hollywood often have wonderful titles. There's Julia Phillips's You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. There's Dawn Steel's slightly odd but nevertheless striking They Can Kill You, But They Can't Eat You. But I do think that this one takes the biscuit.

Then there's the index, worth £5.99 for itself alone. Here are just a few of the entries, chosen at random:

Fried Green Tomatoes

as cannibal version of Steel Magnolias, 179

Griffith, Melanie ability to turn a man's saliva into gravy, 209, 211 Betsy Wetsy voice of, 156 Chatty Cathy voice of, 210-11 frustrated in attempts to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, 209 inexplicable career of, 217 large butt of, 210, 211-12 Hitchcock, Alfred inability to get people like Grace Kelly to sit on his lap, 195-206 Olivier, Laurence

Jewish accent in The Jazz Singer, an act of unintended but nonetheless unforgivable anti-Semitism, 125

Reeve, Christopher acting ability questioned, 62 intervention of God in career of, 65 likelihood of burning in Hell for all eternity, 63, 64 as worst actor on planet, 65 Scorsese, Martin surprising ability to keep getting dates, 139

Of the 24 pieces collected here,

most of the mean-spirited, journalistically irresponsible, completely unbalanced articles that appear in this collection first reared their ugly heads in Movieline, a magazine published by people who are not very nice.

The others are from Rolling Stone and the Washington Post, and Mr Queenan

would also point out that even though these stories were written in a spirit of complete and utter malice, they were written in a spirit of cheerful, life-affirming malice, not the noxious, downbeat variety.

Most are think-pieces which, for once, actually live up to the name, but there are a few interviews and a book review or two. Here he is on a strange little number called Imperial Gina — a biography of La Lollo by her number one fan, Luis Canales, very possibly the only member of the Kyoto University faculty who is a Mormon, a native Portuguese speaker and a major Gina Lollobrigida buff whose second-best

hobby is collecting Yukio Mishima ephemera: Lollobrigida herself once warned Canales that if he went ahead with his lifelong obsession and wrote a book about her she'd sue his samba ass off. She needn't have worried. Imperial Gina is so servilely idola- trous in its attitude toward the star of Where the Hot Wind Blows and Love I Haven't . . . that you might think it was written by her press agent. The way Canales has things stacked up, Lollobrigida's stunning physique has sadly blinded even the finest critics to the delicate talents used to such effect in The Bride Can't Wait, Bride for a Night, Death Has Laid an Egg and, of course, Fanfan the Tulip. Were it not for her legendary bosom and winsome smile, Canales seems to argue, this `volcanic peasant girl' would be thought of as the equal of Hepburn, Magnani, Garbo, Dietrich, Bergman, and, yes, perhaps even Hawn.

There are brilliant knockabouts like `Don't Try This at Home' and 'Mickey Rourke for a Day'; at times Queenan can remind you of the best American pop writ- ers of the Seventies, the kind who died from drinking too much cough syrup towards the end of the Eighties. But there is a crucial difference; no matter how much fun he's having, Queenan never becomes self-indulgent; he neversacrifices our enjoy- ment on the altar of his.

He's the perfect gentleman; while being unfailingly courteous to his readers and other social inferiors (I bet he's great with waiters, too), he is unflinchingly rude to the rich and famous. And the richer and more famous they get, the ruder he is; his pieces on Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand make it hard to believe that there's any point in ever bothering to take these mon- strosities to task again.

At times I realised that I liked him so much partly because — as John Wayne says of Kim Darby in True Grit — he reminded me of me; as I once wished upon a star, in print, when I was young and dumb, that the Eurythmics might die quick- ly in a plane crash (I didn't mean it; it was an 'ironic' plane crash), so Mr Queenan says of The Poseidon Adventure:

Watching the movie, I could not help think- ing how much more fun going to the movies would have been in the ensuing decade if Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens, Shelley Winters, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall, Red Buttons, Pamela Sue Martin and Jack Albertson had actually been on a real-life capsized ocean liner and had drowned.

And of Penelope Ann Miller: Just for the record, if she is still alive, Pene- lope Ann Miller is the worst actress alive. And if she is dead, good.

But it's a better me than I'll ever be; and he's so good that he doesn't even make me feel envious — just pleased that he's alive and published in an age when so many journalists are so mealy-mouthed and self- deceiving that they could almost be, you know, actors.