Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar

In this sometimes tedious, sometimes brilliant, but mostly uneven book, film critic Harvey (Movie Love in the Fifties) takes up James Baldwin's comment%E2%80%94"One does not go to see them act, one goes to watch them be"%E2%80%94and embarks on a chronicle of film history seen through this lens. Part film aesthetics and part personal reflection, Harvey's book covers "icons" like Greta Garbo and John Wayne, through "realists" like Robert DeNiro and Robert Altman's "Nashville", to "transcenders" like Ingrid Bergman and Robert Bresson's "Balthazar". On watching Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown", Harvey observes, for example, that "the enforced intimacy you have with [faces in the movies] subsumes almost everything else going on." Harvey luminously reflects on De Niro's presence in "Once Upon a Time in America": "De Niro all but holds this massive movie together not only by his acting but by his presence and intensity." On Garbo: "Her fame was inseparable from her riddle%E2%80%A6Garbo seemed to have taken [her secret] into the movies." Whether you agree with Harvey or not, his book does drive you to watch the films he discusses once again or for the first time. (July)