A 71-minute doc about Tom Wolfe, Radical Wolfe (2023) shows too much and comments on too much. Plus it makes a mistake in featuring clips from the film versions of Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities while sentences from the books are read aloud. Wolfe didn’t direct those movies!

All the same, Tom Wolfe is here, and engaging, and Richard Dewey‘s doc is usually honest. The huge-in-journalism (unlike journos today) author had many interests, exhibited well after the “intellectual Left” in college exasperated him. He explored New York City, a blue metropolis in all its disjointedness, in Bonfire. Dewey may not see the essential conservatism in this novel and others, but it’s there. . . Granted, I don’t like all of Wolfe’s writings, but his is an outstanding—and important—American success story, journalistic and, up to a point, implacably political. Thus I call it important.

The directing of John Ford (using the name of Jack Ford) is interesting and efficient enough to make his silent Western, Straight Shooting (1917), better than it is. E.g., the inner shots of door frames are there. Rather unpalatable is George Hively’s script about a morally conflicted hired killer (Harry Carey) summoned by a big-bully cattleman. I recommend reading such Western novels as L’Amour’s Down the Long Hills or Patten’s A Killing in Kiowa, both fresh and fun, rather than pulling up this Ford item on Tubi. Not that it doesn’t have its virtues, though.

Both Ake Gronberg and Harriet Andersson are excellent in Ingmar Bergman‘s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), but the Andersson vehicle, Summer with Monika (also by Bergman), is a better film. What would improve Sawdust is if the picture were less blatant and flamboyant, and offered characters less irritating and tiresome than Frost and Frans. Granted, there is cinematic poetry here, but it amounts to little next to Andersson’s sexiness.

(In Swedish with English subtitles)