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Book of the week

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

by Mark Harris

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(Penguin, $28)

In 1968 Hollywood had lost its sense of direction. That spring, says journalist Mark Harris, the five nominees for the Best Picture Oscar were “more than diverse.” They were “almost self-contradictory.” Mike Nichols’ The Graduate ridiculed the middle-class values affirmed by Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? The atavistic violence of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde took a torch to the Apollonian hopefulness of In the Heat of the Night. The fifth contender, Doctor Dolittle, cost twice as much as the other four combined and stood alone as a box-office bomb. Which film ultimately won the Oscar mattered less, Harris says, than which one Hollywood would choose as its template for the future.

“Sometimes a great book is all about the simplicity of its premise,” said John Patterson in the London Guardian. Harris’ “marvelously detailed” study of an industry in transition weaves together the stories behind the making of all five of those pictures. Some of his behind-the-scenes anecdotes may be familiar, but they’ve never been told so “deftly” or with such sharp detail, and Harris’ cross-cutting produces “a nuanced sense” of how gradual a revolution can seem to those making it happen. The veteran Entertainment Weekly reporter is no naïf, said Jim Shepard in The New York Times. He generally embraces the conventional wisdom that “aging and out-of-touch moguls” panicked in the 1960s as their ever-costlier blockbusters failed to reach the burgeoning youth audience. But he nicely “complicates the picture” by showing how seeds of change had been planted within the studio system before breakthroughs were achieved by rebels like Warren Beatty, who produced and starred in Bonnie and Clyde.

Even that film didn’t ignite a lasting revolution, though, said Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times. Sure, American movies made after 1968 “loosened up considerably” in terms of language and sexuality. But the stodgy visual style of In the Heat of the Night—the eventual Oscar winner—is still the rule rather than the exception at today’s multiplexes. Hollywood’s “true revolution” didn’t occur until 1975’s Jaws turned opening weekends into all-or-nothing gambits and exalted the youth audience once and for all. In truth, the best American films of that 1968 Oscar class represented a since-frustrated stirring of artistic ambition. Harris’ “extremely intelligent” and “deliciously readable” book beautifully captures the spirit of their era.

The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street

by Charles Nicholl

(Viking, $27)

In 1612, William Shakespeare was called upon by a London court to help settle some messy business. Some eight years earlier, while living in a home owned by a French Protestant couple named Mountjoy, he had agreed to help his landlords persuade a particular young man to marry their daughter. Now the young man was suing his father-in-law for reneging on his promise of a dowry. Shakespeare had consented to serve as a witness, and the 48-year-old playwright’s testimony wasn’t earth-shattering: He simply backed the son-in-law’s story. But the case offers a contemporary scholar a web of names to investigate. By tracing them, Charles Nicholl hoped to vividly re-create a single period in Shakespeare’s mist-shrouded life.

Nicholl’s gambit “bore delicious fruit,” said William Grimes in The New York Times. Balancing a painstaking commitment to facts with a healthy interest in gossip and supposition, the veteran scholar brings forth “a gaudy, tumultuous, richly imagined world” in which a reader can walk side by side with Shakespeare. The playwright was well established by the time he came to live with the Mountjoys, said Peter Ackroyd in the London Times. He owned property in Stratford but chose to live as a boarder in a tradesman’s house, apparently because he enjoyed the “sense of belonging and not belonging.” What is clear is that the whole atmosphere was sexually charged. “When Shakespeare described brothels and pimps, he knew of what he wrote.”

Two of Shakespeare’s neighborhood acquaintances prove particularly compelling, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. His collaborator on the rarely performed Pericles, George Wilkins, was a flamboyant pimp and brawler. Shakespeare’s French landlady appears to have been a dark, foreign woman of the type that the playwright found most attractive. Nicholl has a “lovely” touch with such matters. He’s deft enough to highlight echoes of life at the Mountjoys in Othello, Measure for Measure, and the other “bitter sexual dramas” that Shakespeare was writing at the time. But if the relationship between playwright and landlady was more than friendship, “it remains,” he writes, “a secret between them.”