Ashby to the Last Detail (From The Oxford Times)

Ashby to the Last Detail

8:21pm Tuesday 16th June 2009

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Film scholars have always bemoaned the lack of a biography about Hal Ashby, the director responsible for such landmark features as Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979). Now, at last, there is one and Nick Dawson's Being Hal Ashby: The Life of a Hollywood Rebel should long remain the definitive study.

In addition to making a close analysis of Ashby's work as an editor, writer and director, Dawson has also sought out the people best qualified to provide the most informed and incisive insights into his personal life and professional achievement. This has clearly been a labour of love, as well as a scholastic undertaking, as not only did Dawson trawl through the papers in Ashby's archive, but he also spoke to his brother, classmates, friends and colleagues, as well as such Hollywood luminaries as Julie Christie, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight and Andy Garcia. Consequently, it is now possible to understand the man, as well as applaud his talent.

Having struggled to come to terms with his father's suicide when he was just 12 years old, Ashby found it difficult to sustain relationships and was married five times. But he made few foes in an industry renowned for its back-stabbing and the fact that he could coax memorable performances from such unpredictable characters as Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda and the late David Carradine speaks volumes for the geniality of his temperament and his grasp of screen craft. Indeed, all lazy references to Ashby as a trippy hippy who was too stoned to function on the set and then edited himself into knots during post-production should be banished forever.

Moreover, there should be no further excuse for denying Ashby his place among the most important American film-makers of the post-studio era. He was an exceptional editor, winning an Oscar for his work on Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967) and devising the split-screen technique that made The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) so chic. Yet he was also an inveterate maverick and, in Being There, he couldn't resist parodying the famously sensual chess match between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, as Peter Sellers and Shirley Maclaine make their moves on each other while watching the picture on television.

Dawson's admiration for Ashby's directorial career is wholly to be expected. But he shows such acute appreciation of his methods and motivations that one longs to see again such scandalously forgotten efforts as the social comedy The Landlord (1970) and the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976) , as well later outings like Second-Hand Hearts (1981) and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), which were dismissed on their initial release as proof that a director who had once had Hollywood at his feet had lost the plot.

Marshalling his facts with quiet confidence and writing with an elegance to match his enthusiasm, this is a fine debut for so young an author and it's no exaggeration to say that no book since Simon Louvish's exceptional study of W.C. Fields has so completely transformed our perception of a major Hollywood figure.

Nearer home, an Oxford-based publisher is currently developing a fine film list and it's to be hoped that Berghahn Books titles will be making frequent appearance on these pages for some time to come.

In the week that his latest feature, Katyn, goes on general release, it's apt to consider Janina Falkowska's Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema. Opening with a concise and lucid biographical chapter, this accessible, but authoritative study approaches Wajda's career a decade at a time to demonstrate both his mastery of his medium and his extraordinary cultural curiosity.

To arthouse audiences, Wajda will forever be associated with the wartime trilogy of A Generation (1954), Kanal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), as well as the Cinema of Moral Anxiety masterpieces, Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), which proved so crucial to the emergence of the Solidarity trade union. But Falkowska draws attention to such little-seen gems as Lotna (1959), Everything for Sale (1969), Without Anaesthetic (1978), A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents (1986) and Korczak (1990) to reveal both their indebtedness to an impressively wide range of filmic influences and their pertinence to the contemporary Polish scene.

But Wajda didn't solely reference the likes of neo-realism, the nouvelle vague and cinéma vérité in finding ways to circumvent the prescribed tenets of Socialist Realism. He also drew on the Polish Romantic tradition, popular literature, jazz, Surrealism, the theatre of the absurd and countercultural subversion to force domestic audiences to confront the events that had shaped the nation's traumatic recent history and face the future with fortitude. He may never have been as radical in terms of structure and content as Jerzy Skolimowski, but Wajda's films have an audiovisual ingenuity and a narrative integrity that make them valuable snapshots of their times, as well as magnificent works of art.

Billy Wilder didn't always think in terms of art and posterity, but his pictures certainly reflected the zeitgeist, particularly in the immediate postwar era. Gerd Gemünden reveals a keen insight into Wilder's psyche in A Foreign Affair. But while he recognises the morality that underpins the cynicism that seeps through the Galician's wondrously sour oeuvre, he places too much emphasis on an exile complex that all-too-rarely manifested itself in his Hollywood films.

It's always an easy tactic when reviewing books to dwell on what the author has chosen not to explore. However, this book sells the reader short on the subtitle promise to discuss `Billy Wilder's American Films' by tackling only seven of them - Double Indemnity (1944), A Foreign Affair (1948), Sunset Blvd. (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Fedora (1978). This should make an admirable canon. But the latter two aren't strictly American films (they were registered as British and Franco-West German respectively), while Gemünden omits such coruscating dissections of American society as The Lost Weekend (1945), Ace in the Hole (1951) and The Fortune Cookie (1966), as well as the three features that best summed up his conflicted attitudes to the America he had adopted and the Europe he had left behind: The Emperor Waltz (1948), Stalag 17 (1953) and One, Two, Three (1961).

Although Fritz Lang has always been cast as the most fabulist of the directors who sought refuge from the Third Reich, Wilder made a pretty good job of hiding what he really thought about his past and his present. In his later years, he was abetted in this conspiracy by Cameron Crowe, who rarely questioned trenchantly enough while conducting the interviews that were published as Conversations With Wilder. To his credit, Gemünden pries more deeply and, if his reading of his chosen septet is occasionally spurious, he asks enough awkward questions to compel the reader to reassess the contradictions in Wilder's personality and how they helped mould his films.

Despite having six Academy Awards to his credit and more titles on the National Film Registry than any other director, Wilder was never an auteur and, thus, fell through the cracks as the young turks of Cahiers du Cinéma compiled their pantheon of worthies in the mid-1950s. However, he has too long been considered simply a superior studio film-maker with a sly line in dyspeptic humour and, if nothing else, Gemünden's fascinatingly flawed volume might inspire someone to undertake the vital revision. Perhaps Nick Dawson would be interested?

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