Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazarby James HarveyFaber and Faber, 2014 Veteran film critic James Harvey's new book, Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar, is a brilliant book laboring under a wayward title. This chatty, engrossing, gigantically knowledgeable book isn't really a focused study of star power, since half its energies are devoted to exploring the talents behind the camera rather than in front of it. Harvey is every bit as insightful and readable on the careers and geniuses of John Ford, William Wyler, Sergio Leone, or Martin Scorcese as he is on the major actors they worked with, iconic Hollywood figures like Bette Davis, Greta Garbo (the subject of the book's opening and most stunning essay), or John Wayne. The book should rather have been called something like The Great Collaborations, although Watching Them Be is certainly catchier.By any other name, however, the book is sinfully readable. Harvey not only writes about some key seminal movies in the history of cinema, he uncannily watches them again right alongside his readers, bringing every nuance alive with his wonderfully evocative prose, like when he examines, frame by frame, the opening scene of John Ford's great 1957 western, The Searchers:

And yet we hardly see Wayne's face through all this. In the shifting arrangements of the figures he is the towering gray-coated one, but we've seen his tenderness - in that leaning from his great height to kiss the wife on her brow. In this sequence, her face has been the focal point. but at the end, as she moves back, leading him through the door into her home, his monumentality effaces her, both in the door frame and the one on the screen. Not ominously - gently, even sweetly. Like that kiss. That engulfing monumentality is a sign of what Ford by the end of the fifties has made of Wayne both as his actor and his star. And The Searchers is its richest expression.

Film students - a group one imagines bulking large in the potential readership of this book - would very much profit from observing how deftly Watching Them Be skirts both the tedium of insider knowledge and the vapidity of mere praise. Harvey varies the tenor of his narrative with the fine control of an orchestra conductor, and he's got a virtually flawless ear for the parting fillip. Look at the carefully-compacted roller-coaster ride of just one paragraph dealing with New York, New York, Martin Scorcese's 1977 follow-up to Taxi Driver:

In every way, the movie was a calculated experiment - almost as if Scorcese had set out to verify Renoir's remark about "great truth" in the Hollywood fakery by heightening both the fakery and the truth. Against stylized backgrounds, he shows what he called "the documentary," the naturalistic behavior of the dramatic scenes (a scarifying quarrel scene), which were usually and largely improvised - and a greater frankness, a more painful honesty (Jimmy's serial infidelity) about the familiar characters and situations. But the shoot itself was an unhappy one, Scorcese later said, much of the time feeling out of control (not just over budget and over schedule, but marked by drugs, more than usual, and by Scorcese's ill-starred romance with Minnelli). If the movie's good, he said later (he wasn't so sure), it's mainly because it's truthful. (It was a huge flop.)

Of course, as with any passionate book on the movies, Watching Them Be will spark as many heated arguments as it does calm agreements (the glowing estimation of Godard, for instance, might strike even the most pretentious readers as a bit much). But that's fine: one of the underlying themes of the book is that harmony is boring and conflict is fruitful. And agreement or disagreement notwithstanding, the book will prompt a great deal of attentive movie-watching and re-watching - an enthusiastic process in which the only real loser will be 21st-century Hollywood.