Shorter notices The Best of I. F. Stone's Weekly Edited by Neil Middleton. (Pelican 60p)
I. F. Stone started his own newspaper in Washington in 1953. His writing is a constant reminder of what democracy should really entail. This volume contains some of his best criticisms of the follies and extremes of American politics. It includes articles dealing with The Cold War, race, and the US's policy towards China and the Middle East. Mr Stone is always fair. He justifies campus revolt without being blindly pro all aspects of youth rebellion. He laments the death of JFK, while pointing out the difficulties he would have had to face with Russia and Cuba. For those who think that journalism is of necessity uncommitted, this book should show them how it can be used as the vehicle of one person's moral and political convictions. I. F. Stone is an admirable man, and a remarkable one.
The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book Arlene Croce (W. H. Allen £4) The Bonnie and Clyde Book Edited Sandra Wake and Nicola Hayden (Lorrimer £3.75)
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were a Hollywood film publicist's dream. They had style, they had class, they were almost European.
The copy about "dancing across the screen, the nation and into the hearts of the world " all but wrote itself. And dancing. declares
Miss Croce, is quite simply what the couple were au i about. They transformed it "into a vehicle of serious emotion between a man andY woman. It never happened in movies again." However questionable the premise, there is no denying the enormous enthusiasm with which Miss Croce pursues her quarry through the ten films they made together between 1933 and 1949. It's good to know too just how the movies came to be made: Astaire's meticulous preparation of each dance sequence with the young Hermes Pan, the relative contribution of director Mark Sandrich (The Gay Divorce and Top Hat), and the deliberate re-working of the story formula from picture to picture. The trouble is that Astaire and Rogers are about an awful lot more than dancing. None of their films exist in a social vacuum. Their evolution from the paper-thin twenties veneer of Top Hat to the rather tougher. thirties realism of Swing Time is as much a comment on American attitudes as it is "serious emotion between a man and a woman." It's no accident that RK0 had less financial success with their Astaire and Rogers movies after 1936. Too much reality killed the 'style', but reality — in its bustling New Deal sense — was what audiences wanted as Roosevelt's second term got under way.
It was another thirty years before Arthur Penn sprang Bonnie and Clyde on an unsuspecting world, though when you read the newspaper notices that Sandra Wake and Nicola Hayden have thoughtfully included at the end of The Bonnie and Clyde Book you would be forgiven for forgetting that Bonnie and Clyde is far from being a first cousin to Public Enemy and You Only Live Once. Pauling Kael, judicious to the last, makes this point about the thirty year time lag well, in her lengthy review. She does us all a service too with a timely reminder that Penn's violence, once divorced from the actual context of the film, becomes a mighty red herring. It's a pity though she lets pen run away with her tongue, unchecked by her customary insight. Bonnie and Clyde is about the nature of American Myth and indeed the self-generating nature of those myths. Had the Barrow gang lived back in the ' West ' in the 1850's and not the Depression they'd have undoubtedly been heroes not anti-heroes. Penn's film proclaims that simplistic cultural irony that the advance of American Society with its insidious 'niceness ' is on the one hand the triumph of civilisation, but on the other the damming up of the springs that should water that very civilisation. That is the terrible beauty of Bonnie and Clyde's death. There's nothing in The Bonnie and Clyde Book that gets near this. Miss Kael's essay is included along with David Newman and Robert Benton's screenplay and a humorous account of how it all happened for them, and there are a number of over-solemn interviews with Penn and Warren Beatty, who produced the film. The usefulness of published film-scripts, apart from being a quick—though invariably expensive—source of reference — seems to me doubtful and most of the other material already exists in easily accessible form. The book is decidedly short on stills too and when will editors and publishers ever learn and make clear the vital difference between frame enlargements and
production stills? CC.
Queen Victoria's Little Wars Byron Farwell (Allan Lane, Penguin Press £3.95)
It is no surprise that the man who once coped so competently with the bewildering life of Sir Richard Burton should once again have succeeded in marshalling a mountain of incongruous facts and turned them into a cogently written, eminently readable commentary. The tone is invigoratingly tart and especially well served by Farwell's nice sense of the ridiculous, for instance his hilariously straightfaced listing of all the multifarious Napiers who galumphed in such profusion across the battlefields of the period, of his close concern for the afflictions of Sir Evelyn Wood, of whom we read, "Sickness-prone as always, he suffered from fever, sunstroke, indigestion, ague, toothache, intestinal complaints, neuralgia, inflammation of the ear and was trodden on by a camel." Later Wood breaks his ankle and his doctor accidentally overdoses him with morphine. Still later: " Wood never served in a.campaign in which tre was not injured, if not by the enemy then by himself."
Farwell's policy is to take the strategy for granted and concentrate on the commanders, so that his book is really a diverting compendium of cranks and eccentrics, most of them brave, nearly all of them thickheaded. The one regrettable omission is the WolseleyRoberts private war, which Farwell, with his engaging blend of derision and affection, could surely have moulded into a priceless comedy. What is most interesting of all about the book is the way its author treads the thin red line between jingo affection for the Empire and the modernist's inclination to debunk. Farwell is under no illusion about the death of the imperial order, but it is evident from the precision with which he pinpoints the start of the decline in the debacle at Majuba Hill, that he would not have minded so much if that decline had been delayed a century or two. B.G.
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