Book: Alistair Cooke at the Movies

Overview

Alistair Cooke at the Movies gathers the journalist-broadcaster’s film writing across seven decades, revealing a critic who treated cinema as both popular entertainment and a serious record of modern life. Published posthumously in 2009, the volume draws from Cooke’s early columns as the Observer’s pioneering film critic in the 1930s, his American dispatches during and after the war, and later essays and broadcasts, to chart the rise of Hollywood’s studio system, the evolution of British film, and the shifting tastes of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Scope and Contents

The collection ranges confidently from silent-era legacies to the high polish of studio classicism and the uncertainties that followed its decline. Cooke writes about stars as artisans and emblems: Chaplin as moralist and mime, Garbo’s carefully cultivated enigma, Astaire and Rogers as a democratic ideal of grace. He explains the mechanics of genres, how musicals convert urban bustle into choreography, how noir distills wartime anxiety into shadow and hard talk, while taking stock of landmark works including Citizen Kane, Disney’s early features, Hitchcock’s thrillers, and John Ford’s westerns. He reports from sets and premieres, files Oscar-night reflections on the annual pageant of self-congratulation, and weighs the merits of British craftsmanship against American showmanship. Wartime pieces probe propaganda’s uneasy marriage with artistry; later essays consider television’s disruptive pull and the collapse of the old studio contract system.

Themes and Arguments

Cooke’s central preoccupation is the negotiation between art and commerce. He admires Hollywood’s ability to industrialize excellence, lighting, editing, acting styles honed to a sheen, yet remains alert to the formulas that stifle invention. He treats the star system as a modern mythology, in which studios generate gods and scandals with equal skill, and he returns often to the audience, the darkened cinema as a civic space where strangers momentarily share awe, laughter, and dread. Censorship and the Hays Code recur as forces that perversely sharpened ingenuity, pushing writers and directors toward subtext and tempo. As a British emigré who became a chronicler of American life, Cooke is especially acute on the movies’ version of the national promise, the optimism that projects forward and the kitsch that curdles, and on the contrapuntal vitality of British film when it abandons stage-bound respectability for cinematic thinking.

Portraits and Judgments

What distinguishes the pieces is Cooke’s knack for pen portraits that feel both intimate and detached. Moguls are sketched as practical visionaries, half showman, half accountant. Directors appear as craftsmen first, philosophers second; Hitchcock’s meticulous psychology sits beside Ford’s mythic composure. Cooke is quick to praise the durable pleasures of well-made genre films and equally quick to puncture bombast. He is attentive to technological change without credulous boosterism, writing clearly about sound, Technicolor, and widescreen as tools that alter rhythm, performance, and audience expectation rather than as marvels in themselves. His judgments age well because they are grounded in observation, how a camera’s angle changes a joke, how a dissolve sustains heartbreak, how a cut cues laughter.

Style and Significance

The prose is urbane, economical, and amused, rich in aphorism but never showy. Cooke’s broadcaster’s ear gives his criticism a spoken clarity; his journalist’s eye keeps it rooted in places and people. The cumulative effect is a cultural history told in episodes: a record of how the modern imagination learned to dream in images and how an industry learned to package those dreams. As an anthology it preserves a conversation across time between a curious, exacting spectator and the movies he loved, tolerated, and sometimes refused. It offers today’s reader a lucid map of cinema’s golden age and its aftershocks, drawn by a writer whose transatlantic vantage and humane skepticism let him see both the magic on the screen and the machinery behind it.