So Much Minutiae

Weinstein [ So Much Minutiae Bernard Weinstein Kean University So Much Minutiae McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstop/ ofthe Hollywood Blacklist. St. Martin's Press, 1997. (776 pages, $35.00) The number ofbooks on the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950's grows yearly. From Bertolt Brecht's /ourna/s to Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, from John Howard Lawson's Film in the Battle ofIdeas to Victor Navasky's Naming Names to Walter Bernstein's Inside Out, we have documented accounts ofa sad period in history when many creative talents were either muted or consigned to stagnation or driven to "cooperate " in betraying colleagues and friends. Some of those affected —like Jules Dassin, Jeff Corey, Ring Lardner Jr., Faith Hubley, Martin Ritt, and Lionel Stander—were able to rehabilitate their careers, but not the majority. What distinguishes Tender Comrades from the rest of the corpus is that it uses oral history in retelling the stories of these personalities—35 in all—in their own words. Sad as the stories may be, however, many ofthe personae interviewed by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle are so obscure and their cinematic accomplishments so limited that one feels only a mild twinge ofpathos instead ofa genuine sense ofloss and waste, the by-products of tragedy. Another liability to empathy is the fact that among the storytellers in this volume are a few hardcore Stalinists, who remained staunchly loyal to the Soviet Union even after the Hitler-Stalin pact, the purge trials, the infamous "doctors' plot," and the revelation of the gulags. But what hurts the book most is that it contains so much minutiae and so many irrelevancies to the blacklist that we soon tire of the stories the contributors tell. Who cares whether actor and dialogue director Mickey Knox liked producer Hal Wallis or had an affair with Wallis' secretary, or the circumstances ofFaith Hubley's first marriage when she was 17, orJeff Corey's theories ofacting. Many ofthe interviewers' questions are aimless and unfocused and many ofthe interviewees' comments supply little more than chitchat and gossip. The Columbia University Press Companion to American History/American Film General Editor: Peter C. Rollins The Columbia University Press has published anumber ofsynopticworks over thelast tenyears and manyreaders ofFilm &History own one or two. The press has received good feedback about a proposed volume on how American History has been reflected in American Film. The Editor of Film & History, Peter Rollins, will edit the volume and is in search of authors/contributors. The audience for this reference work will be high school and college students; teachers in search of films to complement classes in American history; researchers who wish to investigate how film and television have treated their special field. Prospective authors should note the audience; this is not a film studies text. It will be a collection of information and interpretation ofhow basic themes, topics, eras ofAmerican history have been treated by Hollywood. Existing models for these studies can be found inJohn O'Connor's American History/American Film (Ungar, 1988) and in Peter Rollins' Hollywoodas Historian (UP ofKentucky, 1983). Expected publication date is summer, 1999 106 I Film & History ...