Budge: What Happened to Canada's King of Film by Barbara Wade Rose (review)

540 letters in canada 1999 than her larger situation. Similarly, in her chapter `Northern Gothic: The Early Poems, 1961B1975,' there is only a fleeting reference to the mythopoeic school that so influenced Atwood during her early writing career and the impact of her affiliation with Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson at Victoria College. Stein does not develop in any detail how interdependent Atwood's and Frye's theories of Canadian identity once were. She suggests that Atwood's Survival has raised heated debates about the definition of a Canadian literature without adequately situating those debates within a given time and place. Further examination of Atwood's role as writer and critic within a shifting Canadian literary milieu would provide useful background for both Canadian and international readers. Such contextualizing might also clarify Atwood's own political commitments. Curiously, Stein's summaries of Atwood's writing seem at odds with her repeated suggestion that Atwood is seen to `mistrust politics.' Any reader of Atwood must confront the constant pressure that Atwood puts on the structures of patriarchy and imperialism. According to Stein, the major theme that links all of Atwood's writing is her belief in the power of storytelling. Referring to Atwood's protagonists as Scheherazade figures, Stein suggests that `Atwood's fictions and poems demonstrate powerfully and poignantly that the stories we tell ourselves and each other may explain or obfuscate, entrap, or liberate, lead us to safety or destruction, and bring us to the depths of despair or the heights of joy.' This broad statement avoids the specificity of Atwood's works. The fact that her storytellers are Scheherazades implies that they face particular dangers from external threats. However, these dangers are only briefly introduced in Stein's opening chapter. A deeper analysis of the structures that Atwood confronts in her writing might help to give Stein's thorough and engaging introduction to Atwood's writing an even more focused, less descriptive quality. (JOANNE SAUL) Barbara Wade Rose. Budge: What Happened to Canada's King of Film ECW 1998. 260. $16.95 Books focusing on a single Canadian filmmaker are usually studies of their œuvre. There are few biographies. Among the English-language studies are anthologies on David Cronenberg, Denys Arcand, and Joyce Wieland and the odd monograph such as Jim Leach's recent study of Claude Jutra [see above]. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Canadian Film Institute published a series of short pamphlets on such directors as Allan King and Paul Almond, and then longer works on Norman McLaren, Don Shebib, and Jean Pierre Lefebvre among others. All conformed to a format favoured by 1960s auteurism: article, protracted interview, and filmography. Among the few biographies, those that stand out are Peter Morris's David humanities 541 Cronenberg: A Delicate Balance (1994), which mixes biographical narrative with analysis of films to show how they offset one another, and D.B. Jones's The Best Butler in the Business (1996), integrating Tom Daly's life and philosophy with the evolution of National Film Board documentary filmmaking . Frank Radford `Budge' Crawley (1911B1987), filmmaker, producer, and founder of Crawley Films, first received book-length attention with Budge: F.R. Crawley and Crawley Films, 1939B1982, edited by James A. Forrester (1996), conforming to the CFI format, but published much later. Its 112 pages serve as preparation for a longer study of Crawley's life and work. A study of the work is yet to appear, but the biography now has. Barbara Wade Rose is an award-winning journalist known for her articles on business and technology, and so it is no surprise that she was drawn to Budge Crawley. Trained as an accountant, he built his career on a free-wheeling entrepreneurialism buttressed by an uncompromising commitment to private-sector filmmaking. He involved his whole family in the operations of Crawley Films over the forty-three years of its life under his direction, and his vaulting ambition drove both family and company to dizzying heights (including an Oscar in 1976) but finally to collapse. This is the stuff that legends are made of, and Rose has set out to chronicle one. It is not a scholarly assessment, as Rose makes clear...