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A critique of the Hollywood movie is a critique of the imagination of the twentieth century in the West. Could this be what Robert Coover, most undeceived and quintessentially American of writers, is up to in this new collection of stories, characterised as they are by his particular quality of heroic irony? Certainly they are located almost entirely within the territory of the American film except for a side-trip into a British one, ‘Milford Junction 1939: a Brief Encounter', which gets onto the bill for
A Night at the Movies
under the description of travelogue.

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison. But Coover is no respecter of mysteries. The book kicks off in the cinema, with a story called ‘The Phantom of the Movie Palace'. But nowadays the cinema is a rat-haunted, urine-scented wreck, inhabited only by a lonely projectionist screening reels at random for his solitary pleasure.

‘The Phantom of the Movie Palace' describes the method of much of what is to follow, as the projectionist puts together his flickering collages:

He overlays frenzy with freeze frames, the flight of rockets with the staking of the vampire's heart, Death's face with thrusting buttocks, cheesecake with chaingangs, and all just to prove to himself over and over again that nothing and everything is true. Slapstick
is
romance, heroism a dance number. Kisses kill.

At last the projectionist finds himself flattened into two dimensions, up there on the screen, ‘surrendering himself finally . . . to that great stream of image activity that characterizes the mortal condition'.

Coover exacts a similar surrender from the reader. There is some exceptionally strenuous image activity ahead in these stories that precisely reactivate the magnificent gesticulations of giant forms, the bewildering transformations, the orgiastic violence that hurts nobody because it is not real – all the devices of dream, or film, or fiction. Coover is also diabolically, obscenely, incomparably funny.

The collection includes, besides the travelogue already mentioned, a weekly serial, some shorts, a cartoon, a musical interlude, and not one but three main features – a Western, a comedy, a romance. Every aspect of the mortal condition, besides every type of Hollywood genre, is comprehensively covered. Some of the movies invoked are imaginary; some, like the musical,
Top Hat
, reinvent the familiar in hallucinatory terms: ‘he had some pretty fancy moves, but all that nimble-footedness looked to me like something he mighta learned tippytoeing through the cowshit.'

‘Shoot Out at Gentry's Junction' starts off deceptively straightforwardly: ‘The Mex would arrive in Gentry's Junction at 12:10. Or had arrived. Couldn't be sure . . . Sherriff Henry Harmon grunted irritably and eased his long pointed boots to the floor.'

So far, so good: already the stereotypes are briskly in play and, as so often in Westerns, the set-up is strictly Freudian. If Hank Harmon, clearly the Henry Fonda role, ‘a tough honest man with clear speech and powerful hands', stands for the Superego, then the Mex is, as ever, the Id incarnate. ‘Here he is in the schoolhouse demonstrating for the little childrens the exemplary marvels of his private member.'

The presence of the Mexican bandit, his grotesque Hispanic
accent, that amazing private member, the appalling stench of his fart – ‘The goddam Mex had let one that smelled like a tomb' – his presence transforms the genre. With the Mex at the centre, all becomes a bloody carnival of sex and death.

It soon becomes obvious the terrible Mexican must triumph at the shoot-out. ‘Adios to Gentry's Junction! . . . The storekeeper, the banker, the preacher, they swing with soft felicity from scaffolds and the whisky he is running like blood.'

The two other main features exhibit no less manic invention. ‘Charlie in the House of Rue ‘ – yes; it
is
that Charlie – takes slapstick via its own remorseless logic of paranoia and anxiety to a place of the deepest anguish and disquiet, as darkness, ‘like the onset of blindness,' irises in on the clown. ‘What kind of place is this? Who took the light away? And why is everybody laughing?'

If Coover turns a Western into a savage fiesta and a Chaplin two-reeler into an analysis of the compulsion to repeat, he is cruellest of all to the love story that is, of all film romances, most precious to buffs, for he turns
Casablanca
into a blue movie in which Rick and Ilsa get it on again in no uncertain manner: ‘he's not enjoyed multiple orgasms like this since he hauled his broken-down black-listed ass out of Paris a year and a half ago . . .'

This is desecration on the grand scale, a full frontal attack on – or, rather, a full frontal revision of – one of the sacred texts of American cinema. But Rick and Ilsa also founder amongst gathering shadows and uncertainty. The other characters wait downstairs in the bar for the lovers to get up and dress and the action to continue but is that possible, now? Hasn't everything been changed? The story, nostalgically titled ‘You Must Remember This', ends the book; the ending is an unanswered, unanswerable plea: ‘And then . . .? Ilsa . . .? And
then
. . .?'

It is a wild night, this marathon night's viewing, in the semi-derelict picture palace of twentieth-century illusion, from which gangsters can whisk you away in an unmarked car during the ‘Intermission', send you spinning through a dozen different hazards – sharks, seraglios, dud parachutes, etc. – and drop you back in your seat in time for the shorts.

But, wait. Something has happened while you have been away. Now the audience is ‘all sitting stiffly in their seats with wierd flattened-out faces, their dilated eyes locked onto the screen like they're hypnotized or dead or something'. The most virtuoso
single exercise in the book, the strangest, the most exemplary in its demonstration of the transforming resources of narrative, ‘After Lazarus,' concludes with a coffin being lowered towards the camera. ‘Sudden blackness.'

At this moment, impossible not to recall, as if they were prophecy, the final words of
Weekend
, Jean-Luc Godard's great film of the Sixties, ‘Fin du cinema. Fin du monde'.

(1987)

In its heyday, the period 1917–60 dealt with in
The Classical Hollywood Cinema
, Hollywood was a gold-rush boom town, a place of pilgrimage, when the young and the beautiful, the cynical and the depraved, the talented, the lucky, and the doomed thronged to seek their fortunes. That was how it was supposed to be, at any rate, and, oddly enough, that was really the way the capital city of illusion was, as if Hollywood itself were its own greatest production.

Easy to forget, nowadays, how unprecedented the movie industry was in its mobilisation of vast amounts of capital, both financial and human, in the production of pleasure. Easy to forget the religious fervour that possessed the audiences, those communities of strangers crowded together in the dark. (How appropriate that, according to
Hollywood Anecdotes
, one of the abandoned Art Deco picture palaces in New York has been consecrated as a Pentecostal tabernacle.)

Hollywood was, still is, always will be, synonymous with the movies. It was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production. ‘We take Hollywood seriously, treating it as a distinct mode of movie practice with its own cinematic style and industrial conditions of existence,' state the authors of
The Classical Hollywood Cinema
, and proceed, comprehensively to do so.

But there was an extra dimension of scandal and glamour that was also an essential part of the product. John Ford said that you couldn't geographically define Hollywood. Almost as soon as the
studios went up, the town was recreated via the twentieth-century arts of publicity as the home of an ever-increasing pantheon of deities; major, minor, and all sizes in between. Star worship wasn't a perversion but a genuine manifestation of the religious instinct. (Some of that sense of the sacred rubbed off the movies on to the US itself, too, which is why we all venerate the Stars and Stripes.)

Janet Leigh thought the MGM lot in the Fifties was like fairyland. Other actresses did not. ‘ “Darling,” drawled Tallulah Bankhead to Irving Thalberg, “how does one get laid in this dreadful place?” '

But did she really say it, or did somebody put the words in her mouth? ‘Hollywood thrives on apocryphal aphorisms,' say the authors of
Hollywood Anecdotes
. At least one of their stories – the one about the cameraman who apologises for not getting as good shots as he did ten years before – has a variable heroine, either Greer Garson or Marlene Deitrich or Norma Shearer. The authors categorically deny that another story, told by Elizabeth Taylor about herself, ever happened at all. A favourite story of Hitchcock's has no basis in fact, either.

This is genuinely folkloric material. ‘Telling a story is the basic formal concern,' according to
The Classical Hollywood Cinema
. That is what the Hollywood cinema is there for. Telling stories about the people engaged in telling stories is a basic informal concern, and no matter if these are twice-told tales – they gain richness and significance with repetition.

Much of the contents of
Hollywood Anecdotes
will be familiar to buffs, and loved because it is familiar. There is the MGM lion (‘Ars Gratia Artis') who in old age, had to be fitted with dentures, and also the lions (25 lions at 25 dollars a head) who pissed on the assembled Christian martyrs in Cecil B. de Mille's
The Sign Of The Cross
. Though, alas, the toothless lion of whom Victor Mature
(Androcles and the Lion)
said ‘I don't want to be gummed to death', is missing.

Sam Goldwyn's famous deformations of English are lavishly quoted: ‘You've got to take the bull by the teeth,' etc. Boller and Davis are fond of funny accents; they wouldn't dream of omitting Michael ‘Bring on the empty horses' Curtiz.

They cite genuine curiosities, like the brothel, Mae's, staffed
by film-star lookalikes (‘Claudette Colbert' spoke excellent French). Ben Hecht's celebrated dictum gets another airing: ‘Starlet is a name for any woman under 30 not actively employed in a brothel.' Otherwise, Boller and Davis are decently reticent about the abundant sexual folklore of Hollywood, which the prurient are advised to seek in Kenneth Anger's two volumes of
Hollywood Babylon
.

All in all, the tone of
Hollywood Anecdotes
is oddly similar to those little Sunday school compilations of the sayings of saints and worthies. Any incident, no matter how trivial, is worth recounting if it concerns a star or near-star. Christopher Plummer, it is said, hated
The Sound of Music
so much he nicknamed it
The Sound of Mucus
. Abbot and Costello once threw a suitcase of condoms at their director in the middle of a scene. Well, well, goodness gracious.

Close-Ups
– designed to look like a mock-up of a Thirties movie annual – is the very stuff of legendary history, a collection of star ephemera spanning seventy-odd years complete with iconic representations. Odd little snippety articles go with the photographers, some of them historic documents such as Alvah Bessie's obituary of Marilyn Monroe and Budd Schulberg's weird threnody for Judy Garland, other bits of makeweight scribble even if the by-line makes you blink – Sergio Leone on Henry Fonda, for example.

Danny Peary, the editor, describes
Close-Ups
as a scrap-book. Leafing through it is an unnerving experience; like flicking through the channels late at night on television, catching snatch after snatch of old movies diminished by their transmission through the indifferent air. When we talk about Hollywood nowadays, we talk about nostalgia, but Brecht described his own experience in Golden Age Hollywood: ‘Every morning to earn my bread,/I go to the market where lies are bought/Hopefully/I take up my place among the sellers.'

The hell of it was, they made wonderful movies, then, when nothing in Hollywood was real except hard work, mass production, the conveyor belt, the tyrants, and madmen running the studios.

The Classical Hollywood Cinema
quotes François Truffaut: ‘We said that the American cinema pleases us and its film-makers are
slaves. What if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.'

(1988)

This account of an American sentimental education starts off according to the conventions of such things: ‘I met Maria during my next-to-last year in prep school.' In the US, prep school prepares you for college; the narrator is on the threshold of adulthood but, although an intense friendship with Maria, painter, socialist, Lesbian, nascent feminist, will be central to his life, she is far from being the romantic heroine who will administer his lessons of the heart.

Yet, in a sense, she saves his life, or, at least, his sense of self by introducing him into the hard-working, easy-going Bohemia of the Fifties, where our existentially dishevelled hero can feel, if still not quite at home, at least less abandoned in the world.

Love as such will come much later, almost at the novel's end. As for passion – well, perhaps the preconditions for passion won't arise until after the novel is over, because you need high self-esteem to engage in a passionate attachment, you need to believe yourself worthy of one, and the narrator of this lucid book spends the greater part of it coping, with considerable fortitude, with the conviction he is depraved, or mad, or worthless.

After he has finally found, and lost, his first great love, he tries to exorcise the pain by writing about it: ‘Yet how could I like myself, or ask the reader to take seriously a love between two men?' The novel itself is an answer to that question.