AUDREY HEPBURN’S fans just won’t go away (and why should they?). A National Film Theatre retrospective a few years ago was packed out, with a large proportion of the audience wistful, middle-aged men.
If anything can bring a smile to such sad faces — short of Hepburn’s resurrection — it will be The Audrey Hepburn Treasures (Simon & Schuster, £30/offer £27) by Ellen Erwin and Jessica Z. Diamond, less a coffee table book, more a remarkable act of devotion.
It contains a potted biography, stressing the adulation and the good works. But what makes it a camp classic is the meticulous care taken to reproduce numerous artefacts from Hepburn’s life — family photo albums, a postcard from Hubert de Givenchy, a ticket to a preview of Breakfast at Tiffany’s — that are contained in folders and that you can touch and leave casually scattered around your bedsit. Essentially, the publishers are offering the chance to be Audrey Hepburn. And isn’t that what the most obsessive fans want most? Probably a year sometimes goes by without a book about Orson Welles, but I can’t remember one. Twenty-one years after the great man’s death, the tussle goes on between those who think he was washed up as soon as he left Hollywood, and squandered the rest of his life overeating, appearing in television advertisements and making incomplete home movies, and those who bother to look at the evidence. (There, I’ve declared myself.) Joseph McBride appeared in one of those unfinished late films, and is firmly of the latter persuasion. In What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (University Press of Kentucky, $29.95/£14.15 from Amazon.co.uk) he investigates Welles’s FBI file, exactly what he was doing during his last decades, and other places that most researchers don’t go. It also sends you back to the outstanding body of work that was completed, which is what a good book should do.
Imagining Reality (Faber, £14.99/£13.99) is a fascinating look by two movie mavens, Mark Cousins and Kevin Macdonald, at documentary films — since Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore no longer the dowdy sister of features.
Documentaries have been going since the Lumière brothers filmed workers leaving their factories, and Cousins and Macdonald chart a glorious history through newspaper reviews and period interviews with film creators. There will be people you’ve heard of, and many you haven’t, but all are worth investigating.
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As in any year, the big film guides — Halliwell’s, Time Out and so on — have new editions dissecting the latest releases as well as all those dissected in previous years. But more in tune with the DVD age is DVD Delirium (FAB Press, £14.99/£13.99), now in its third volume. A quick glance at the titles within — Chopping Mall, Death Laid an Egg, Entrails of a Virgin (it’s true!) — might suggest that this is not for you. But amid all the freak fests and slashers are innumerable hard-to-get art house movies and obscurities available somewhere on DVD. They are analysed with unfailing intelligence and a surprising lightly-worn erudition.
The best reviews, essays and interviews of the veteran critic Roger Ebert have been anthologised in Awake in the Dark (University of Chicago Press, $29/£13.70 from Amazon.co.uk). That Ebert is so often wrong is curiously unimportant. As he writes: “A movie is not good because it arrives at the conclusions you share, or bad because it does not.” The same goes for criticism, and there is much here to enjoy.
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