Sammy Davis Jr. in A Man Called Adam on DVD
Wim Wender's Paris, Texas on DVD
14th Annual Kansas Silent Film Festival - Feb. 26 & 27
Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 on DVD
Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 1 on DVD
Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy on DVD

New Books in Print: Street Smart: The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese and Lee

The diversity of New York City's neighborhoods has left distinctive marks on four New York-bred filmmakers. In his new book Street Smart: The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee, Richard A. Blake offers a novel approach to understanding the influence of the borough upon the works of four of New York's favorite sons: Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. Blake argues that a good understanding of each director's neighborhood of origin is necessary for a comprehensive critical grasp of that director's films.

The vision and imagination of these directors have been shaped by their respective neighborhoods, not by a broadly stereotyped celluloid New York. In turn, each director has shaped his films using his own particular New York experience. Blake examines the directors' native villages - from Flatbush and Fort Green in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan - and discusses their films, not to evaluate accuracy of detail, but rather to trace the strands of the authentic New York experience that give these films their particular quality. Street Smart is also an insider's appreciation by a native New Yorker. Blake includes information and commentary on the neighborhoods that provided the explicit "New York" character of the films he discusses. "Ethnic awareness is part of the fiber of New York neighborhoods. Even when these four directors do not explicitly set out to make sociological observations, their stories gain a depth of texture by showing the racial and ethnic complexities that their characters face as a realistic part of their lives," Blake says.

Street Smart examines the diverse social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds with a solidity not found in other auteurist studies, and the book also remedies the fact that little critical work has been done on Lumet and Lee. "Both directors are extremely didactic and moralistic," says Blake. "Taking their works systematically uncovers a lot of ambiguity that Americans feel about their ethnic heritage."

To order Street Smart: The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese and Lee, use this link to Barnes and Noble.