Arthur Penn

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

by Robin Wood, Ian Cameron (Editor)

Arthur Penn--director of The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant, and Little Big Man--was at the height of his career when Robin Wood's analysis of the American director was originally published in 1969. Although Wood then considered Penn's career only through Little Big Man, Arthur Penn remains the most insightful discussion of the director yet published. In this new edition, editor Barry Keith Grant presents the full text of the original monograph along with additional material, showcasing Wood's groundbreaking and engaging analysis of the director.

Of all the directors that Wood profiled, Penn is the only one with whom he developed a personal relationship. In fact, Penn welcomed Wood on the set of Little Big Man (1969), where he interviewed the director during production of the film and again years later when Penn visited Wood at home. Both interviews are included in this expanded edition of Arthur Penn, as are five other pieces written over a period of sixteen years, including the extended discussion of The Chase that was the second chapter of Wood's later important book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. The volume also includes a complete filmography and a foreword by Barry Keith Grant.

The fourth classic monograph by Wood to be republished by Wayne State University Press, this volume will be welcomed by film scholars and readers interested in American cinematic and cultural history.

Genres: Film

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Robert Paul Wood, known as Robin Wood, was an English film critic and educator who lived in Canada for much of his life. He wrote books on the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Arthur Penn. Wood was a longtime member - and co-founder, along with other colleagues at Toronto's York University - of the editorial collective which publishes CineACTION!, a film theory magazine. Wood was also York professor emeritus of film.[2]

Robin Wood was a founding editor of CineAction! and author of numerous influential works, including new editions published by Wayne State University Press of Personal Views: Explorations in Film (2006), Howard Hawks (2006), Ingmar Bergman (2013), Arthur Penn (2014) and The Apu Trilogy (2016). He was professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Reviews

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 4 out of 5]

How beautiful were the words of Robin Wood! Are the essays of this once-legendary critic remembered? Does anyone living recall the radical power of Wood’s Film Comment essay on grindhouse auteurs—like Larry Cohen and Tobe Hooper—being artists to be spoken of in the same breath as Martin Scorsese or Robert Altman? Or his writing about homosexuality and cinema, which dwarfs much of the more “canonical” writing on the subject? Wood is a special joy to me in that he was that rare film critic—the late lamented (by me) John Simon was another—who deeply knew literature, opera, painting. Wood could even—imagine this now!—create a dialogue between different art forms in discussing a single work.

And then there is his subject, Arthur Penn. No one young (or youngish) today can fathom that at one time it was a commonplace to read in a film essay a phrase like “...as we see in the films of Godard, Antonioni, Fellini and Penn.” What? You mean the guy who worked for Dick Wolf and directed PENN AND TELLER GET KILLED? He is forgotten; and yet, Gene Hackman said only two filmmakers ever taught him anything about acting: Francis Coppola and Arthur Penn.

Robin Wood’s highly politicized form of auteurism features one blind spot that drives me, pardon me for saying, batshit crazy. Like so many others (Richard Brody is a 2020 example), Wood assumes that directors “shape the scripts” of their movies in the days of classical Hollywood; and that “shaping” becomes “he might as well have written it himself.” There is among auteur critics a steadfast refusal to acknowledge the multi-directional complexity of production. This is especially lamentable in the case of Penn, where the glories of the films are the glories of masterly writing as often as not.