The professional who aspired to tell the greatest story ever

Academic film study has tended to ignore George Stevens, director of such exemplars of classic Hollywood cinema as A Place in the Sun , Shane and Giant , along with sparkling prewar screwball comedies and RKO musicals, among others. Overall, scholars have tended to regard Stevens's films as intelligent and well-meaning but cinematically uninspired. The standard impression is that he made highly professional films with strong pretension toward meaningfulness and efficacious competency of style. Critical consensus assumes Stevens's films to have frequently sacrificed vitality to the desire to seem important.

In her critical biography of Stevens, a rare book-length study of the director, Hollywood Reporter critic Marilyn Ann Moss sets out to revise the conventional view of Stevens to suggest the value of critical engagement with his work. Moss accepts that generally Stevens's cinema was imbued with thematic pretension (if not, pretentiousness). In fact, her central claim is that his experience of the Second World War led Stevens to believe that popular cinema had to cease being frivolous and had necessarily to engage with big issues. Yet Moss insightfully looks at the very texture of the films themselves to show that often they engage in plays with cinematic form in ways that go beyond mere obeisance to meaningful message. There are moments of sheer poetry in Stevens's cinema, and Moss does well at evoking them through careful close readings.

At the same time, her study is no slavish bit of cultism. Moss is ready to note when Stevens's ambition backfired. For example, a long section early in her book makes use of feminist film theory (especially, Laura Mulvey's famous analysis of the camera's fetishistic look at women as objects) to analyse the failures in sexual representation of Stevens's screwball film Woman of the Year , which engages in a dreary domestication of feisty Katherine Hepburn. Even more telling, Moss devotes the finale of her book to Stevens's late-career decline when he decided his role as serious thinker necessitated that he make a gigantic biblical epic, the budget-bloated box-office failure The Greatest Story Ever Told .

It is unfortunate, then, that Moss's book has been put together in ways that detract from her call for renewed attention to Stevens. First, there are typos such as the misspelling of "Cassavetes" in one epigraph that makes one suspicious of the scholarship. Second, for a book whose subtitle promises the account of a "life", Moss's volume often seems unbalanced in the unevenness of the space it devotes to various biographical elements. Moss notes, for instance, that in 1931 Stevens's wife, Yvonne, got pregnant, although we had not yet been told of the marriage (and then a few pages later, they are divorcing when Stevens has an affair with Hepburn). Moss's book seems too short for the number of topics she wants to cover, and there often is not a good sense of proportion. Third, and connected to these other problems, the book is downright repetitious. Her fundamental assertion that Stevens's cinema took a turn toward high seriousness because of his experience of the horrors of war is insightful (he was one of the first film-makers into the concentration camps after their liberation), but Moss restates it incessantly.

Like Stevens's ambitious disquisitions themselves, Moss's volume is often a noble effort, but it falls short of convincing the reader to look anew at his body of work.

Dana Polan is professor of critical studies, School of Cinema-TV, University of Southern California, US.