'Paperback Celluloid' by Andy Rohmer
Paperback Celluloid: Elmore Leonard on Film is an interesting idea for a book. Author Andy Rohmer examines the more than 30 big screen films based on one of America’s significant 20th century fiction writers, Elmore Leonard. Paperback Celluloid is not arranged in the order of the films’ releases but according to the stories’ publication dates. As a result, Paperback Celluloid bounces back and forth across the decades, from Leonard’s first story adapted for the screen, 3:10 to Yuma (1957 and the 2007 remake) through the last, Freaky Deaky (2012). By his own admission the movies of Leonard’s childhood, the 1930s, inspired him to write. Who can blame him if after the ‘60s, his novels were written with film rights in mind?
The many directors who handled Leonard’s material are scrutinized in turn. Rohmer admits to being a more or less unreconstructed auteurist (nothing wrong with that if the theory’s limitations are in sight) and writes passionately about his favorite filmmakers. He calls Budd Boetticher, who directed the second Leonard film adaptation, The Tall T (1957), “the Euripides of the Wild West, taking John Ford’s open landscapes and turning them into oppressive outer places … accentuating the characters’ contingency.”
As displayed in Rohmer’s bibliography, several previous authors have staked out Leonard’s life and other critics have parsed his body of work—if none with Rohmer’s precise focus. He thankfully avoids what he rightly calls “speculative post-structuralist jargon” and “academic overreach,” but inserts himself distractingly into the narrative. On Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Get Shorty (1995): “He graduated from NYU (my alma matter, may I interject, if at an advanced age and in film-unrelated German studies).” Those sort of interjections do not enhance the readers’ appreciation for the subject at hand or the argument Rohmer makes, which is that the books were usually better.
Paperback Celluloid: Elmore Leonard on Film is the work of a smart, engaged fan.
