Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  Anthology films have long been a rare though not unheard-of presence in the industry dating as far back to at least the early 30s. There have been stylistic variations but generally the plot is held together by a common thread. The novelty was often though not always seeing different directors adding their own style to their own portion of the narrative. Unsurprisingly, results varied from film to film but from segment to segment. Perhaps D.W. Griffith succeeded best of all in what is likely the first of its kind, Intolerance from 1916.     If I Had a Million , from 1932, attracted such contemporary masters as Ernst Lubitsch, William A. Seiter and Norman Z. McLeod, each to direct the tale of a different hopeful awaiting their share of an inheritance.   The process was altered in 1942 with Tales of Manhattan in which one director, Julien Duvivier, traced the story of a tailcoat as it changed hands from patron to patron. The mood changes here were derived from a ca...

  The Wizard of Oz remains more than eighty years later one of the greatest films ever made but its very enduring popularity has obscured the fact that forty years earlier, long before Tolkien and Pratchett, L. Frank Baum created an elaborate fantasy world with its own history, laws and customs. For those who explore them beyond the first, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , from 1900, the Oz books are a reminder of the wonder, the frights and the joys timeless fantasy can bring. Baum who, at the time had a minor career as a newspaper head and the author of assorted poetry books for children conceived of the first book as an all-American counterpart to the traditional European fairytale. It is not much of an overstatement that the symbols, the phrases and the characters from the first (and subsequent) Oz book have become embedded in the fabric of American folklore. He strove away from the grim darkness of the bohemian fairytales but still thrilled his readers and the enchantment has pr...