When I was a kid, one of the urban legends that matriculated through the schoolyard told of a cunning test by the Japanese of their opponents in the Pacific war. They would take a prisoner, legend had it, and nail his penis to a table in a hut, hand him a cleaver, and then set fire to the hut. The infantile imagination was asked to ponder the soldier choosing between his manhood and his life, although it’s really a choice between one kind of death and another. This is popular among kids aspiring to philosophical grandiosity, as well as among slumming college students giggling between tokes.

The Saw series is built on a foundation of such predicaments. Now in its annual fourth October edition, the Saw film series has reached the level of the Friday the 13th reiterations or the Halloween duplications, and probably come off to most people like them–that is, a cynical exploitation of a once-attractive core idea that squeezes as much money as it can from a steadily diminishing audience. However, the fourth Saw made an astounding $33 million dollars this last weekend, more than thrice its (nearly invisible) budget of $10 million, so an audience made up of who knows whom is still hot for the topic.

As Matt Hills points out in an essay in the new anthology Sleaze Artists, people tend to assume that Friday the 13th is made up of films of mirror-like similarity, nothing but a hulking brute tramping through the woods in pursuit of yet another nubile college girl, but in fact the films, in the experience, have an unexpected diversity. Indeed, the ostensible villain, Jason Voorhees, isn’t even in all of them. Hills warns us against dismissing the films too quickly and complains that even within a culture that increasingly celebrates bad art, exploitation, and vulgarity, even the Friday the 13th films are deemed beyond the pale.

Saws share a similar diversity. They are not of uniform cookie cutter dimensions. The first Saw was simply the latest straightforward serial killer film with a twist, and shot on a budget of excruciatingly obvious poverty. Its surprise popularity in relation to its cost dictated a slightly more lavish sequel, one that confined its effects to one large dark abode and had a new surprise twist to add, i.e., that this time the serial killer had a confederate implanted into the old dark house. The third film was almost more like a medical thriller, as the serial killer used his entrapping wiles to compel a doctor to operate on him. The fourth chronicles his tricks enacted from beyond the grave and adds yet another surprise.

The serial killer at the heart of the Saw series is nicknamed Jigsaw by the police, but is really named John Tuck, and is played by character actor Tobin Bell in a gruff monotone. In the first film he turned out to be a janitor or orderly in the hospital where one of his victims practiced; from that lowly position, he could observe almost invisibly the cruelty of people toward each other. It was not explained how a mere janitor could afford the lavish digs in which he enacted his rituals, but in fact an explanation was forthcoming, only three films later. It is also worth pointing out that Jigsaw doesn’t technically kill his victims. He leaves them in a situation that requires that they choose either their own death via the grisly Rube Goldberg devices they wake up to find themselves in, or to murder someone else who is imprisoned in tandem with them. Communicating via closed circuit TV or by cassette tapes, Jigsaw, in the disguise of a ghastly marionette, lectures, cajoles, or taunts his victims. Jigsaw’s contraptions and set-ups are elaborate moral lessons, and in this regard he is in line with modern cinematic serial killers, who are often presented as dispensers of justice. Jigsaw’s roots, so to speak, go back to the unnamed serial killer in se7en, who punished hedonists for their sins. What is little known is that Saw started as a short film that offered a variation on one of the final film’s elaborate deaths. The short film, made to attract money to the project, appears on one of the Saw DVDs.

I can’t remember how Jigsaw escaped justice in the first film, but the madmen in these kinds of films often do in order to justify a potential sequel. Jigsaw had struck a chord with the audience, probably because of his elaborate contraptions but possibly also because of his moral fervor, and as it happened a sequel was inevitable. The second film takes place about six months after the first one; along with the subsequent two films they make up a trilogy of sorts that is actually one big epic horror story about 270 minutes in length and 500 gallons in blood. Here, Donnie Wahlberg is the cop on his trail, his predecessor, Dina Meyer, ending up one of Jigsaw’s victims. Jigsaw has a hold over the cop, his son, who is in the house with the other strangers. Shawnee Smith, as Amanda, is another carry over from the first film, where she was one of Jigsaw’s few survivors, and she proves to be a ready acolyte to his worldview. Jigsaw needs an heir, as he is dying of cancer, we learn.

Original director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell have created a closed universe, not just in the series of dank chambers their characters find themselves in, but also in the continual re-appearance of people from earlier films who are dispensed with quickly by Jigsaw or who are revealed to have additional identities (Wan dropped out as director after the first, and neither participated in No. 4). Among the recurring characters appearing in No. 4 are Donnie Wahlberg (again, to meet a dire end), Costas Mandylor as cop Hoffman, Betsy Russell (she of the ’80s exploitation cycle such as Avenging Angel ) as Jigsaw’s ex-wife Jill, and Lyriq Bent as Rigg, another troubled cop. New are Gilmour Girls’s Scott Patterson as FBI agent Strahm and Athena Karkanis as his partner Perez. This closed universe means that no character will evade a dire fate and that they will be re-imagined from picture to picture.

If 3 was a long medical drama, then 4 is an “origin story.” In frequent and sometimes confusing flashbacks that are shuffled into the “now” narrative, we learn what drove Jigsaw to be judge, jury, and manipulator. Jigsaw always plays fair. His victims can get out of their traps if they want. It doesn’t mean they will be free of damage, or that he doesn’t have a few tricks up his sleeve. After all, he introduces his tableau as “games” he wants to play. But he is driven by both a sense of justice and a sense that his victims are squandering the gift of their lives. Like Dexter on Showtime, he has become a complex agent of justice in a squalid world.

As with the Friday the 13th films, critics sit in front of the Saw movies but they don’t see them. They also tend to review the audience rather than the movie, fret over the demise of the culture, and attempt to figuratively cleanse themselves after the experience by making sure we know that they garnered no pleasure from watching people being tortured. But any film series this popular demands more serious consideration. Sadly, the sobriquet “torture porn” doesn’t accurately reflect what happens in these films, as the characters aren’t tortured per se but put in excruciating situations and asked to make a choice. Be it Hobson’s or not, it is a choice. And it must reflect something of the weird culture we find ourselves living in.

Virginity seems to be on the minds of our top celebrities. Otherwise known in our modern era for their unrestrained, envy-inducing hedonism, movie actors are not otherwise celebrated for their sensitivity to the nuanced transitions of everyday lives. But for some reason, in the course of an Entertainment Weekly cover story on his new movie, American Gangster, Russell Crowe mentions that when he was making The Quick and the Dead with Leonardo DiCaprio, the then-21-year-old actor was still a virgin. Meanwhile, in The New Yorker, Steve Martin, in an excerpt from his forthcoming autobiography, describes the loss of his youthful virginity to a future celebrity in her own right. Though, most Hollywood figures lose their virginity in the course of Satanic rites that inaugurate them into the elect crew whose careers are then guided by administrators of Beelzebub’s corporation.

Interestingly, Martin goes on to write about another of his early romances. She was a black-clad bohemian named Mitzi, who turned out to be, when she brought him home to meet the parents, the daughter of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, whom I just mentioned in an earlier entry, and whose letters, as a consequence, I’ve been re-reading. Martin’s callow, outsider’s view of Trumbo is fascinating.

Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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James Gray (1969 - XX)
Ranking: Lightly Likable

Cowboys and Indians (short film, date unknown); Little Odessa (1994); The Yards (2000); We Own the Night (2007); Two Lovers (2009); Alphabet City (2008)

If nothing else, James Gray needs to be saluted for maintaining an integrity of vision within a soul destroying industry. He has been both writer and director on the three releases credited to his name thus far. He doesn’t appear to have compromised his ideas, his films, or his approach. There are, thus, the inevitable gaps between the feature films, approximately seven years, slightly longer than normal for modern film production, but a time frame which constitutes both a sign of potential integrity and a frustration to his fans.

If the adage “write what you know” is applicable to filmmaking, than Gray has seized it. The child of Russian immigrants, he was raised in Queens, and all of his films so far have been gritty New York dramas. They have the expansive political concerns of a Sidney Lumet film combined with the intense nervous energy of a Martin Scorsese epic. Like Richard Price’s tales, Gray’s films so far focus on family tension, primarily the conflict between brothers. His vehicle for exploring these tensions, at least in his first two films, is the figure of the returning wastrel, Tim Roth in Little Odessa , a hitman of Russian extraction returning to Brighton Beach to perform a hit, and Mark Wahlberg in The Yards , a car thief returning home from prison, wanting to go straight but soon falling under the sway of his childhood friend, Willie Guitierrez (Joaquin Phoenix). In We Own the Night , set in 1988, a family is divided by its different interests, police work in one direction, disco night-clubbing in the other. Gray pursues these themes with an intense commitment that demands respect even when the films themselves might seem indistinguishable from each other.

Gray’s muse appears to be Joaquin Phoenix, who is in two of the films (and possibly a third), and who seems to be the Gray equivalent in We Own the Night, whose main character, Bobby Green, has dropped his given name, Grusinsky, for the more ethnically neutral last name of his mother’s side of the family. But unlike the characters who serve as his avatars, Gray has higher artistic ambitions. He initially set forth to become a painter, and his films, especially The Yards, have a painterly look, and are often surprisingly but not unpleasantly static for urban crime films. Gray gravitates toward actors with Oscar potential, and has a knack for seeing complexity in actresses commonly viewed only as sex symbols, such as Charlize Theron. Eva Mendes may start out in We Own the Night as a stupefyingly erotic icon, but soon evolves into a complex character who is a secondary victim of Bobby Green’s inner turmoil.

If there were more films to judge, Gray might evince both a more vivid thematic effect and be crowned with a higher ranking, so time will tell if he will broaden his appetite or burrow further into his small set of themes and obsessions. For the time being, Gray shows great consistency of vision and style, but also a limiting concentration on his operatically arrayed retinue of interchangeable characters. His next films are slated to be an urban love story from a collaborated-upon script, and an adaptation of the book Alphabet City by Steven Knight.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the Barry Lyndon of Westerns. This isn’t praise, it is merely description. The film employs a narrator, whose text probably comes from the Ron Hansen source novel, who continually spoils what you are about to see. Spoil-phobic internet movie site visitors will be thrown into a tizzy over this, but the trick’s ancestry is noble.

This Western is directed by Andrew Dominik, otherwise known for the crime portrait Chopper, which introduced Americans to Eric Bana. So his key directorial strength appears to be eliciting good performances from drop-dead gorgeous males. He has a wealth of them in Coward, including Brad Pitt and Sam Shepard as Jesse and Frank James. But Dominik doesn’t skimp on the odd-looking thespian. Sam Rockwell and Casey Affleck are also in the film, as the brothers Ford. It’s interesting to compare this 160-minute film to Samuel Fuller’s tight, efficient I Shot Jesse James, which just came out on DVD, and which it resembles in a couple of ways, but not enough. Fuller’s film is a fantasia on the theme of friendship; Dominik’s is a brooding, moody ’70s anti-Western, eager to show you how life really was. For example, there is an excellently staged scene, an intimate shoot out in a bedroom, where you can almost smell the stink of the revolvers’ discharges. The pain is palpable. On the other hand, the film is too enamored of its own prestige; DP Roger Deakins goes in for long-held shots of various men on horseback slowly riding across the Kansas prairie toward yet another isolated farm house.

Fuller didn’t like Jesse James. From his research he concluded that James was an odoriferous, predatory bisexual with a mean streak. But he left all that out of his film. He was more interested in Ford, a man who admired James, but who nullified that admiration by killing him for a bounty. Brad Pitt plays James as an unlikable, closed-in man. But he is essentially almost invisible in the film. He also doesn’t listen to the narrator, who says that James suffered from a disease that made him over-blink. Pitt hardly blinks at all.

Coward was shot two years ago and is only now coming to the screen. Aside from the fact that it looks boring, like Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp movie, Coward also has the seeming deficit of casting Casey Affleck as Bob Ford. But as we’ve seen from the simultaneously release Gone Baby Gone, he can be effective when used right. Here his callowness serves the dimensions of the character. Note the scene when he sneaks up on Frank James and tries to weasel his way into the gang. Here, and throughout the film, his line readings are unpredictable but most apt. But as Joe Bob Briggs says, there is way too much plot here getting in the way of the story, and after three hours you wonder why there where so many side trips down unproductive plot paths, such as a visit some gang members make to a relative in Kentucky. Fuller was more interested in the social and psychological after-effects of Ford’s killing of James, but in Dominik’s approach it only takes up a few minutes. His concluding suite of images is effective, but too little way too late.

I’ve continued to think about The Darjeeling Limited since reviewing it for the October issue. I’m fascinated by director Wes Anderson’s use of sudden, searching zooms-in on characters’ faces. I know it’s a quote from some movie or movies or style from the 1970s, but I can’t place it (guess I’ll have to wait for the audio commentary track on the disc). Anderson also uses slow motion a lot, another throwback to the ’70s, and nowadays used mostly for commercials and music videos.

There are some known sources for the film, however. Anderson has said in interviews and on panels that Jean Renoir’s The River was a big influence on his film, probably in the pair of deaths that bookend the film’s story. My colleague Kim Morgan has pointed out that ’70s director Hal Ashby is said to be a major inspiration for Anderson, especially Harold and Maude. You can see that influence at the end of Darjeeling, when the mother of the three brothers “frees” them to grow up the way Maude leads the way for Harold.

But I think that there is another key Ashby influence on Darjeeling: The Last Detail. This 1973 tale, from a novel by Darryl Ponicsan, about two sailors escorting another sailor from the naval base to a military prison, is one of the great films from the 1970s. It solidified Jack Nicholson as the key actor of his era. It was deliciously, shockingly, famously foul-mouthed. I think I must have seen it 20 or more times. If you have seen it too, think of the similarities. Both concern a train ride. Both have a trio at the center of the story. Each of the three characters has its analog in Anderson’s film. There are even scenes of spiritual quest (and sexual quest) in both films. But most of all its the tone of rising camaraderie and enlightening adventure. Ashby’s film remains the more “realistic,” but its shadow on Darjeeling is long. On a side note, Ponicsan wrote a sequel to his novel, in which the Randy Quaid character is portrayed in his life after prison. That novel, Last Flag Flying, may end up adapted to the screen by Richard Linklater, another student of ’70s cinema.

In the aftermath of my profile of Tim Lucas at Green Cine daily, other material about the author and editor has popped up on the Internet. There is a terrific, lengthy and detailed interview with Lucas at DVDTalk, conducted by Stuart Galbraith IV, a specialist in Japanese films. Also, a competing profile of Lucas just appeared in the Cincinnati city magazine (in which my profile is quoted, but I am called “D. K. Hall”). I’m told that there is a forum thread about my profile of Lucas over at the Classic Horror Film Board, but I’m afraid to go visit it.

Thinking about Lucas I realized that he shares numerous characteristics with another favored writer, Bill James, recognition of whom was inspired by the baseball playoffs. James is the onetime author of the popular Baseball Abstracts series, followed by a historical abstract, and books on baseball managers and pitchers. In recent years, he’s been a consultant to the Boston Red Sox, and been profiledin the New Yorker .

James lives in Kansas City, Lucas in Ohio. James started out as a self-published writer before getting picked up eventually by publishers, and Lucas remains a self-published writer and editor. Both refer to their wives by their first name frequently and casually in their prose. Both are impatient with inaccuracy, unsubstantiated claims, and sweeping generalizations. Both have an engaging American prose style (though James is funnier). Lucas tends toward humorlessness, which I take to be a conscious, furious reaction to the way horror and genre films were written about in the old Famous Monsters of Filmland, all bad puns and denigrating jokes. Both writers attract fanatical acolytes and true believers, because the fields they write about attract such types, and they inspire a certain sentimentality amongst their devoted readers despite their oft-curmudgeonly demeanor. In the end they are purely American. They are in the tradition of those lone voices speaking out against stupidity. They probably still feel lone, despite having achieved success doing what they love (neither have had conventional office jobs in their adult careers). In their way they carry the spirit of the small town newspaper editor railing against injustice and the porous arguments of his enemies. James has probably changed the face of baseball, and Lucas has written arguably the best director survey ever published, and both are well-worth revisiting in the twilight of the night, or reading for the first time.

Join Clark Public Utilities’ StreamTeam for a community-based XStream Makeover on Saturday, October 27! Volunteers will celebrate National Make a Difference Day by planting over 1,000 trees along Salmon Creek. Training, tools and supplies will be provided. Sponsored by Clark Public Utilities and BioKleen, this event is great for individuals and families. BioKleen will be on site with samples and information. For more information, contact Lisa Beranek the StreamTeam Coordinator at (360) 992-8585 or StreamTeam@clarkpud.com

Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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John Flynn (1932 - 2007)
Ranking: Lightly Likable

The Sergeant (1968); The Jerusalem File (1972); The Outfit (1973); Rolling Thunder (1977); Defiance (1980); Marilyn: The Untold Story (1980 TV movie); Touched (1983); Best Seller (1987); Lock Up (1989); Out for Justice (1991); Nails (1992 TV movie); Scam (1993 TV movie); Brainscan (1994); Absence of the Good (1999 TV movie); Protection (2001)

The recent passing of John Flynn offers an opportunity to both reflect on and honor a director who toiled — during his career, at any rate — in the much derided trenches of genre film without complaint, reward, or recognition. He may never have transcended his genres, but he never abused them, and took his films seriously regardless of their premises, stars, or release prospects.

Like that other masculinist director from Chicago, William Friedkin, he started out making a film with an explicitly gay theme. In The Sergeant , Flynn and writer Richard Goldstone examine the tensions of a military man with an inexplicable crush on a subordinate (Flynn had been in the Coast Guard, before graduating from UCLA with a journalism degree). Told in the gritty quasi-post neo-realist form that is really a descendant of 1950s television, the narrative itself is like an expanded version of a plot thread in Reflections in a Golden Eye, and yet also anticipates the “moral” lesson of the Chris Cooper thread of American Beauty. But after his initial entrance into the higher arena of serious cinema, Flynn never returned to either that kind of serious subject matter, or that Marty level of TVo-realism. Thereafter, he almost exclusively made crime films, and often outstanding ones, from The Outfit , one of the best of the Richard Stark adaptations in the Parker series, to Out for Justice , arguably the best of the Steven Seagal action films (though Under Siege, directed by his fellow Chicagoan Andrew Davis, vies for that title; Flynn’s is certainly the most comical).

Flynn, whether by design or happenstance, gravitated to strong writers, such as Paul Schrader (Rolling Thunder), Larry Cohen ( Best Seller ), novelists such as Norman Mailer ( Marilyn: The Untold Story ), Richard Stark (The Outfit, though here Flynn is credited with the script), and Andrew Kevin Walker (Brainscan). These films usually starred a favored masculine hero of the day, from Jan-Michael Vincent through Brian Dennehy, Joe Don Baker, and Tommy Lee Jones to Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal. It is as if Flynn’s dealings with difficult method actor and scenery-chewer Rod Steiger in The Sergeant scarred him into invulnerability against the difficulties of future thespian egoists. Not even the bizarre demands of a Stallone or movie-ignorance of a Seagal could impede him.

In the scripts and books that came his way Flynn favored complex tales of crime and betrayal, in that regard anticipating the neo-noirs and films soleils of the 1980s and ’90s. But it is also a masculinist world. Scam is unusual for having a female rogue at its heart. Sometimes, though, he was at odds aesthetically with the text. Flynn’s easeful inhabitation of the masculine world clashes with Paul Schrader’s boy-looking-in-through-the-window-at-the-grownups quality in Rolling Thunder , and Flynn’s classic action craftsmanship is hobbled by Schrader’s essentially static Bressonian moralism. Flynn accepted the conventions of action films, instead of exploring them for cracks and blisters.

Flynn made only about as many films as Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, which is less an aesthetic comparison than a note about how the business was changing just as he entered it. Had he been born 40 years earlier, and entered filmmaking in, say, 1928, he might have been another Raoul Walsh or William Wellman, making three films a year and establishing a consistent array of themes and images. In his later post-directorial years, Flynn lived in Pacific Palisades, where he was active in community activism, a far cry from the world where he was likely to put on film some of the screen’s best fight scenes.

Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. As with Sarris’s book, titles will be in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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James Foley (1953 - xx)
Ranking: The Near Side of Paradise

Reckless (1984), Madonna video “True Blue” (1986); Madonna video “Live to Tell”; At Close Range (1986), Who’s That Girl? (1987), After Dark, My Sweet (1990; also screenplay), Madonna music video “Papa Don’t Preach” (1990), Twin Peaks Episode 2.17 (1991), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Two Bits (1995), Fear (1996), The Chamber (1996), Gun (episode, “The Shot” 1997), The Corruptor (1999), Confidence (2003), Hollywood Division (2004 TV movie), Perfect Stranger (2007), Man and Wife (2008).

Has any directorial career begun as inauspiciously as James Foley’s, yet advanced or improved so dramatically? He is the opposite of Carol Reed, evolving from a base beginning to helming some of the finest films soleils and arguably the best adaptation of a David Mamet play. Nevertheless, Reckless , an “other side of the tracks” teen romance, did establish one consistent facet to Foley’s practice, an interest in young, up-and-coming actors. Reckless was not just Foley’s first film, but Aidan Quinn’s. His next movie, At Close Range , featured an early performance by Sean Penn, paired significantly with Christopher Walken, and later he helped shape the screen persona of Mark Wahlberg ( Fear .

But then Foley fell into the world of Madonna, unable to consolidate her auspicious big screen debut in Desperately Seeking Susan with the later Who’s That Girl? , and in fact turning her into a big screen joke, a status she has been unable to shake. Foley also directed the video for her hits “True Blue” and “Papa Don’t Preach.” But he shook that off, and rebounded with After Dark, My Sweet , one of the first films soleils (and one of the few Jim Thompson adaptations that really understands the author), followed by one of Foley’s most beloved films, Glengarry Glen Ross , with the all male casting coup of Lemmon, Pacino, Baldwin, Spacey, Harris, Arkin, and Pryce all in one movie, doing beautiful work (especially Pacino). What’s curious is how, ultimately, Glengarry Glen Ross is, on a thematic level, in fact, at variance with the rest of his movies.

But then it’s possible that ultimately Foley is “better” with male actors than female actors (or at least pop stars). Yet even in his music video for “Papa Don’t Preach” Foley explores a theme that is consistent throughout most of his films, which is the loyalty demanded of children by their parents. It’s present in Foley’s illustrations designed to accompany the Madonna song, in embryonic form in Reckless, and there in some of his stronger films, such as in At Close Range, in which a son attempts to offer kameradschaft-level loyalty to his father; in the trifling, bucolic and TV movie-ish Two Bits , wherein a boy attempts to honor his grandfather by acting as a go-between; in Fear, in which a father (William Petersen) copes with his daughter’s straying from the fold with the worst possible choice; in Confidence , the late film soleil in which the family is replaced by a team of con men; and even in the recent Perfect Stranger , in which the key to the mystery of Halle Berry’s character resides in a long-ago pact between a mother and daughter. Such consistency across a relatively broad array of films harks back to the studio directors who were able to invest something, anything, personal into the projects handed to them. Of course, it is a different world now, but the values of professionalism that Foley brings to his diverse yet unified projects never goes out of fashion.

Twenty-two years after his death, a “new” Orson Welles is finally beginning to emerge. Slowly, this image is supplanting the calcified older one, which has been in place since at least the mid-1940s. This old image–which posits a reckless abuser of Hollywood courtesy, a frivolous spender with a “fear of completion,”–later evolved into that of a roly-poly TV raconteur and wine pitchman, the ruined hulk of a once promising filmmaker who was destroyed by Hollywood. This image is maddeningly tenacious. The new Welles who is emerging from a parade of recent, more enlightened books on the director is much more compatible with current critical and political thinking. This “new” Welles is a progressive independent filmmaker, a leftist and activist in race relations and free speech issues who perhaps by political necessity relocated to Europe, where his attitude to directing was finally free of deadline-driven, commercialite cinema. There, he could be a man who brewed his films at his own pace, who released no film before its time.

A key text in this slowly evolving new picture is “The Battle Over Orson Welles,” Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of four then-new biographies of Welles, which was published in Cineaste in 1996. That essay has now been reprinted in Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press, 336 pages, $24.95, ISBN 978 0 520 25123 6), happily enough for those who require easy access to it.

This essay accomplished quite a bit in a short amount of space. It introduced to many readers the notion of Welles as an independent filmmaker, a man merely using the resources of the Hollywood machine as long as they would let him for his own ends. This should have replaced the idea of Welles as a talented but still initially compliant member of movie industry machinery. Welles’s philosophical and aesthetic distance from Hollywood is key to understanding his later years in a wholly different light, as a maverick hewing to his own schedule. And Rosenbaum’s essay first introduced to some readers the cracks in the plinth hoisting David Thomson to the skies, fissures later magnified by Adrian Martin and numerous other critics. It was here in this essay that one first realized that Thomson was, or had mutated into, a censorious Hollywood apologist who identified with the movie industry’s producers and studio execs rather than the film artisans he championed in earlier books.

The book gathers 26 essays spanning 1972 to 2005, a mix of dispatches, book reviews, public letters, liner notes, and forewords and afterwords, with attendant intros and suffixes that explain, describe, and offer codicils, revisions, and corrections of misfacts concerning the life and career of Welles. What Rosenbaum suggested in “The Battle Over Orson Welles,” was codified a few years later in “Orson Welles as Ideological Challenge,” a chapter from his 2000 book Movie Wars. Here, Rosenbaum develops further the idea that Welles was in direct conflict with prevailing notions of art and commerce.

Rosenbaum’s book is almost as complex as Welles’s career. Most of the essays demand these demurrals or clarifications or contextualizations from Rosenbaum, some of them engagingly autobiographical (for example, how he once met Welles ), and many are for Welles specialists only, that is, for readers who like to dig into the intricacies and conflicting testimony of Welles’s career the way others like to look for Badge Men in grassy knolls.

The University of California has done a fine service by gathering together Rosenbaum’s essays in one convenient location (with the addition of an enormously helpful appendix in which Rosenbaum methodically goes through Welles’s oeuvre and delivers a status report), but eventually the question arises, why this book and not a massive biography of Welles, one that sets the record straight and shows some actual sympathy for the man and artist, unlike most of previous bios? Rosenbaum explains in passing why such a project would not be congenial to him, only part of which is the fact that, despite all the attention he has lavished on Welles over the years, Welles isn’t even his favorite director.

The fellow critic whom Rosenbaum resembles the most, or at least mirrors in one facet, is Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog. Both are concerned first with getting the facts right, and only then building critical observations. But as journalists, their revisions and updates threaten to lose not just the general reader but the specialist as well. Presumably, Lucas’s new book on Mario Bava is the definitive book on the director, by in part synthesizing all the qualifications and updates posted in VW over the years. Rosenbaum has yet to address Welles in a single volume directed at the filmmaker’s work, as opposed to his career, though who knows, perhaps this anthology is a prelude to such a book. As a collection of chronologically arranged journalism, though, with its revisions and updates, Discovering Orson Welles, as its title suggests, is more about Jonathan Rosenbaum than Orson Welles, valuable to have as secondary, or even tertiary, material.