‘I Loved Movies, But …’
Joseph McBride
Conversations With Danny Peary
Sticking Place Books, 732 Pages

It may just be me, but in a photograph of 17-month-old Joseph McBride, wearing his first red suit and his hand on a toy truck, he appears to have an expression of truculent directness, which perhaps has something to do with the caption: “I loved that truck, but some kid hit me over the head with it, contributing to my needing an eye operation.”

Then I read the Foreword by Jonathan Lethem about the “personal underpinning of Joe’s voice … the degree to which he has been fighting in every line he writes to convey a suspicion that a world which should be marvelous has in some way betrayed us, or had been betrayed, or both.” Some knowledge has been kept from him, which is to say from us, and he is going to reveal what it is, no matter what may stand in his way.

Although I had read Mr. McBride’s impressive books on great film directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Frank Capra, George Cukor, and Steven Spielberg for my own work on Hollywood figures, it was not until I reviewed “Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra,” which exposed Capra’s sometimes malign creation of his own myth — abetted by a certain film historian and by Mr. McBride’s own publisher — that I realized how fierce and unflinching he was about investigating the duplicity at the heart of what too many take at face value.

It is as if Mr. McBride is a denizen of the shadowy world of “Citizen Kane” and is one of those reporters in that dark projection room illuminated only by the projector itself — both a literal and symbolic instrument of bringing the truth of human character and events to light — in so far as that can be done in St. Paul’s world, in which we can see as through a glass darkly. 

Mr. McBride’s cinephilia runs very deep. In a lifelong quest to get a seat at the main events of a cinematic world he has written scenarios, collaborated with Ford and Welles, and befriended Hollywood stars such as Jean Arthur. It does not surprise me that in the introduction to this book, Danny Peary mentions that Mr. McBride has seen “Citizen Kane” 60 times. 

The question-and-answer format of this book is a remarkable way to do biography. Mr. Peary has known Mr. McBride for nearly 60 years. In Part I, “Early Impressions,” he conveys his earliest perceptions of his friend, whom he thought of as a “loner,” already an adult at the age of 10, escaping into his own world of reading and writing. “How far was I from the truth?” Mr Peary asks.

Some of those early impressions are accurate, Mr. McBride responds, and others are “quite far from the truth. It’s fascinating to hear this from you, to see myself as others saw me.” Here, in this exchange, are the makings of biography, and Mr. McBride’s willingness to engage in the dialogue out of which some sort of truth emerges. In short, Part I sets the pattern for the book and for Mr. McBride’s life.

Part II, “Hollywood,” covers Mr. McBride’s reviews, interviews, screenplays, acting — all growing out of his desire to be a film director until he realized that his mission as a writer was the only way to realize what he had to say about the importance of movies.  

He loathes John Gregory Dunne’s “Monster: Living Off the Big Screen,” which is a “sneeringly jocular account of the destructive hackwork he and his wife, Joan Didion, practiced as screen writers.” The Dunne-Didion dismissal of movies is what fuels Mr. McBride’s outrage, as in book after book he investigates the great work of Welles and many others.

Parts III and IV, “Back to Books” and “Teaching and Writing,” do not merely canvas Mr. McBride’s career: They are a virtual history of what has happened to movies in his lifetime as we enter what he deems “the decline of cinephilia.”

Want a quick guided tour of what Mr. McBride can offer you? Check out the book’s listing of his DVD/Blu-ray commentaries, close to 40 of them, which are a revelation of what the movies have done for Mr. McBride and just how much he has contributed to our enjoyment of them.

Mr. Rollyson is a biographer of Marilyn Monroe, Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, and Ronald Colman. His work in progress is “Our Eve Arden.”