J. E. Smyth

The Times Literary Supplement — The most accessible archives are usually those managed by universities and public libraries. Corporations are arguably less welcoming: mindful of brand reputation and profitability, they have been known to discourage independent researchers and writers, or even to bar them altogether. The BBC, the biggest public-service broadcaster in the world, is a special case.

The Times Literary Supplement — In the early 1930s, Hollywood attracted two very different British women. For Ida Lupino, Hollywood initially offered a career she never really wanted, as

The Times Literary Supplement — Ellen Terry once said: "We players know quite well and accept with philosophy the fact that when we have done we are forgotten". Yet, of all her

The Times Literary Supplement — The Northern Irish film-maker Mark Cousins has cultivated a wide and enthusiastic following among social media-minded cinephiles, but the whimsical

The Times Literary Supplement — Scores of actors have played Sherlock Holmes since C. H. E. Brookfield's first stage appearance at the Royal Court in 1893. Everyone has a favourite.

The Times Literary Supplement — Be warned: The latest Ian McKellen film to pop up in your local cinema is not an adaptation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's eighteenth-century spoof of theatrical puffery. The Critic in question is an adaptation of Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn, a lightweight murder mystery published in 2015 but set in the 1930s West End, when ...

The Times Literary Supplement — Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had many things in common. Both were voracious readers and loved nothing better than whiling away a day with a pile of

The Times Literary Supplement — Before Hollywood writers won the right to strike and a fair contract in 1941 (the year Citizen Kane was in theatres), they were underpaid, hired and fired

The Times Literary Supplement — A self-confessed "tough old broad from Brooklyn", Barbara Stanwyck became one of the biggest stars of Golden Age Hollywood, and her brand has worn well

Los Angeles Review of Books — SHE AND BETTE DAVIS had adjoining birthdays, and sometimes they'd party together all night long. One year, Davis gave her a silver cigarette case engraved in the star's handwriting: "To Mary from Bette." I remember the first time I traced the lettering with my fingertip and tried to imagine the occasion.

Cineaste Magazine — The Unmaking of the English Working-Class Actor (Preview)by J. E. Smyth In this Platinum Jubilee year, I am not the only Prisoner of the Motherland looking at the U.K. through the bottom of my empty pint glass and wondering what happened.

Cineaste Magazine — Although female filmgoers probably had to drag their boyfriends to Temple films or those fizzy Ginger Rogers confections or the "women's films" of drama queens Greta Garbo and Bette Davis, men didn't need much persuading to attend Mae West's fare.

Cineaste Magazine — In the early 1930s, Humphrey Bogart wasn't all that different from other American men of his generation-he was out of a job, counting his spare change, and trying to make rent. He was aging out of the romantic juvenile roles he'd hated playing on the stage since his Broadway debut in 1921, and a brief stint in Hollywood had done nothing for his career.

Cineaste - Fall 2020 — CINEASTE, VOL. XLV, NO. 4, FALL 2020 An entire year had passed since Alvin Sargent’s death when I finally forced myself to listen to our last taped conversation. I’d met him when he lived next to Jean Simmons on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica. He’d see her out walking alone sometimes in the afternoon; they’d exchange smiles on rare occasions, but never talked...

Cineaste Magazine — Little Women’s fans are legion; some, like producer Amy Beth Pascal, are ordained at birth, given the very names of the March sisters to inspire and shape their lives. Since 1868, invented tradition, passed from mother to daughter, has sustained the novel’s successive generations of devoted readers. We read the novel as girls, dreaming of a perfect New England childhood, perfecting our ideals of little womanhood, taking vicarious comfort in the warmth of a Yankee hearth, nurturing our little artistic talents while the snow flies…and, years later, we reread the story to our little girls, reinforcing the lessons learned in childhood, or, as Baym would argue, dwelling on a narrative again and again in an act of willful, narcissistic infantilism.

Cineaste Magazine — Ida Lupino’s America: “Just a Big Family of Little Failures” by J. E. Smyth

Cineaste Magazine — The seventy-year flaw in "The Heiress" that no one noticed... by J.E. Smyth

Cineaste Magazine — A review of "Fighting with My Family" by J. E. Smyth

Cineaste Magazine — Since Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete first screened at film festivals in Venice and London last fall, critics have labeled it an “honest” look at “the other America” one rarely sees on movie screens. The praise has been polite, and, occasionally in the U.S., slightly condescending and mildly surprised that a British filmmaker would bring up subjects as embarrassing as American poverty, neglect, abuse, orphaned runaways, homelessness, deserts and ghettos, and utter, gut-turning loneliness. The fact that the film, adapted from Willy Vlautin’s novel, is also a story about a horse and his boy set in the contemporary West (or the “frontier,” according to the language of the production’s press kit) is even more unsettling. Maybe it does take a filmmaker from the north of England to show Hollywood how to make a film about today’s West—and to give America the modern Western it deserves. The locals are too busy chastising the uninterested masses about bad things white people did to Native Americans in the nineteenth century (Hostiles, 2017; Woman Walks Ahead, 2017)...

Cineaste Magazine — A profile of producer Laura Zizkin (Murphy's Romance, Pretty Woman, Spiderman), featuring new interviews with colleagues.

Cineaste Magazine — Produced by Joseph E. Levine, Jane C. Nusbaum, and Martin Poll; directed by Anthony Harvey; screenplay by James Goldman; cinematography by Douglas Slocombe; edited by John Bloom; music by John Barry; sound by Simon Kaye and Chris Greenham; costumes by Margaret Furse; starring Peter O'Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, Timothy Dalton, Jane Merrow, John Castle, Nigel Terry, and Nigel Stock.

Cineaste Magazine — What #MeToo gets right and wrong about studio era Hollywood.

Cineaste Magazine — Review: Tonya Harding’s former figure skating coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) sums it up in the first minute of I, Tonya: “Generally, people either love Tonya or…not big fans. Just like people either love America or they’re not big fans. Tonya was totally American.”

Cineaste Magazine — Produced by Danny Boyle, Christian Colson, and Robert Graf; directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris; screenplay by Simon Beaufoy; cinematography by Linus Sandgren; edited by Pamela Martin; production design by Judy Becker; starring Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Elisabeth Shue, Bill Pullman, Andrea Riseborough, Austin Stowell, Sarah Silverman, and Alan Cumming.