Disposable Lit Reviews

Silman-James Press, 2006
323 pp.
ISBN 1-879505-42-8

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As much as I hate to acknowledge the French doing anything better than red-blooded Americans, I have to reluctantly admit that, at least where Roger Corman is concerned, the French got it right. Even during the heyday of his directorial career in the ’50’s and ’60’s, French film critics were treating Corman as a director worthy of serious consideration and attention, while American didn’t even acknowledge that Corman even worked in the same medium. In the decades since, the U.S. film establishment has grudgingly exhibited a degree of respect for Corman, but even then it’s mostly been in the context of his economic canniness and home-grown “can-do” attitude, not for the movies themselves.

Alain Silver and James Ursini have set out to change that. As professional film academics, the pair has previously written a number of books chronicling various film genres, as well as critical studies of the movies of David Lean and Robert Aldrich. They turned their attention to Corman as a director with the same sense of critical respect, examining each of his fifty credits in order for theme, structure, and various other manifestations of depth, treating Corman not just as an entertainer or showman, but as an auteur. There is no winking sense of “slumming” here, no left-handed compliments placing Corman’s output in the context of drive-in movies as cinematic “junk food.” Instead, they treat the movies with the same assumed acknowledgement of worth as anything within an artistic canon. Here are our texts; what do we find within? These are academic professionals; there is endless discussion of sexual politics, of psychological archetypes, of cultural and counter-cultural political expression; there are terms like “reify” and “mise-en-scene.” Even on the rare film whose artistic failures they forthrightly declare (yes, I’m talking about Gas-s-s-s! (1970)), they are simply matter-of-fact about their appraisal, without relying on potshots and witticisms. (Compare that to yours truly, who’s never let the opportunity for a cheap shot in a review go by unexploited.)

Each of the films Corman directed gets three to five pages of commentary, concluding with a couple of paragraphs from Corman himself. Also included are shorter summaries of movies which Corman co-directed to one degree or another, and a complete (as of press time) list of movies on which Corman’s involvement was as a writer, producer, or executive producer.

I highly recommend this volume as a necessary companion piece to Corman’s own increasingly out-of-date autobiography.

Nathan Shumate