BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Steven Spielberg never envisioned “War Horse” as a war movie.

Steven Spielberg

Instead, the celebrated, Oscar-winning director of such classic war pictures as “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List” said he saw the World War I-era story based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel and the Tony Award-winning stage production as something much more intimate, more delicate.

“I’ve done other pictures about war, but I do not consider ‘War Horse’ to be a war movie at all,” Spielberg said during a press conference hosted by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures at the Regency Hotel. “I consider it to be a character story. I consider it to be a love story between a horse and a young man. Also, it’s a story of great hope and great connection that this horse makes to every character, both German and British, as the horse travels on an episodic journey, almost an odyssey.”

“War Horse” follows the episodic story of a spirited colt named Joey as he bonds with young farm boy Albert (newcomer Jeremy Irvine) in the flinty English countryside of Devon, as boy and horse are torn apart by the arrival of World War I, as Joey is shipped off for cavalry duty, falls under the gentle care of a sickly French girl, is forced into cruel labor by German artillery officers and finally ends up stranded and injured amid the carnage of No Man’s Land at the Battle of the Somme.

“The war is a backdrop. It provides the necessary drama to pull these characters apart and eventually reunite them,” Spielberg said. “So war is more of a catalyst than the cause celeb. This is a human narrative. It’s about the connectivity that an animal can bring human characters. It’s really much more a story about hope that can exist in extremely dark circumstances because hope is always in Joey’s face.

“It’s always in Joey, the way he moves, the way he breathes, the way he doesn’t look at what’s gonna happen tomorrow,” the director said. “He just exists and brings so much connectivity to the characters on both sides of the war. So I never looked at this as a war movie, and I think that’s probably why we don’t have an ‘R’ rating because I didn’t shoot it the way I shot ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or the way I produced ‘Band of Brothers’ or the ‘The Pacific’ with Tom Hanks.”

Several critics have noted echoes of classic Westerns in this film, especially evocative of the work of the great sagebrush auteur John Ford.

“Certainly, John Ford’s work factors not just into my films and not just ‘War Horse,’ but a lot of us who studied film and love film really admire John Ford,” Spielberg said. “And yet I didn’t consciously create a tome to John Ford with ‘War Horse.’ I didn’t consciously do that. I simply went to England, looked at the locations, and became very emotionally involved in how important the land and the sky were going to be.

“And obviously I become very involved in the look of the film,” he said. “We knew because it’s such an epic story that the land is a character. And nature is a character. It determines whether the crop you bring in is going to be a success; it determines whether you’re going to lose your farm or not to a foreclosure. The land was so important to these poor farmers, and the land makes such a strong statement later in France at the Somme, No Man’s Land, it’s called. It just seemed like I was going to use wider lenses, and rather than shoot everything in close-up I was going to fall back and let the land help tell the story.

“And John Ford, of course, did a lot of that with Monument Valley in all of his Westerns,” he said. “But so did other directors like David Lean and Akira Kurosawa in celebrating the land that they were shooting their pictures on. So it wasn’t really about John Ford, it was about an opportunity that availed itself to me because of how spectacular these locations were.”

Spielberg said because of the popularity of Morpurgo’s 1982 young adult novel and the stage production (which garnered five Tony Awards) he felt there were some special challenges in bringing the story to the screen.

“The greatest challenge for me was in realizing why I even wanted to make it in the first place,” he said. “So many people came out of the play talking about the brilliant puppetry of the horses. But I came out of the play respecting the puppetry and thinking indeed it was brilliant. But I came out of the play affected not because they were puppets playing horses and great puppeteers creating a reality with those kinds of maquettes. I came out of the play admiring the story that was being told to me, a very strong narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. And I was very struck emotionally by the storytelling of the people who adapted Michael Morpurgo’s book into a play.”

Still, Spielberg said he was nervous about tackling a project that carries such high expectations from fans of the book and play. He used the Yiddish term “schpilkis” (meaning on pins and needles) to describe his anticipation.

“I always hide my nervousness because everyone else is nervous, so why impose my burden on them?” he explained. “They’ve got their own problems to solve, memorizing their lines, figuring out how to play the scene that day. So I don’t really expose my own process to anybody else because it’s hard making movies.

“But I need to stay nervous. If I don’t stay nervous I’m not going to direct anymore, because nerves keep me honest,” he said. “I don’t rely on confidence to tell my stories. I just literally show up on the set and hope there’s a little bit of mojo stirring around in there that day. Some days there’s not and those are really hard days. But the days that there are it’s better for me to come to the set with an open mind and an open heart than to come to the set with everything figured out like I’ve just built the iPad and I’ve tested it and I’ve test marketed it and I know it’s going to work.

“I don’t know what’s going to work until it works,” Spielberg said. “And I also don’t know what’s not going to work until it fails. I just don’t know. This is how I’ve directed all my life. And that little bit of nervousness everyday keeps me honest and keeps me from thinking that I have all the answers.”

As for “War Horse,” Spielberg said he hopes the movie raises people’s awareness and encourages them to be kinder to animals.

“In this day, people don’t have exposure, they don’t have interaction with horses,” he said. “I hope this movie makes people appreciate the innate and natural intelligence of horses. And I also hope this movie brings an awareness to the plight of horses both after World War I and the plight today in a very sad turn of evens in which the slaughtering of horses is being permitted for food as a renewed export industry, which makes us all very sad.”

Striking out on a journey-quest not unlike that of the contemporary Indians of 1989’s “Powwow Highway,” Cree documentarian Neil Diamond sets out in his rambling film “Reel Injun” to locate the true heart of America’s indigenous people in the sideshow babble of Hollywood history.

Charting a course in his rickety “rez car” from his Canadian home near the Arctic Circle to Los Angeles, Diamond constructs a loose travelogue that seeks to examine the evolution Hollywood’s depiction of American Indians in the movies over the past century plus (from Thomas Edison’s earliest Kinetoscope image of Indian dancers onward).

“Reel Injun,” told with no shortage of world-weary irony, makes stops along the way at several iconic locations that figure strongly in the shifting stereotypes that moviemakers have used to depict Native Americans. Those include the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Crow Agency in Montana, Little Big Horn, the Navajo Nation and Utah’s Monument Valley (where so many John Ford-John Wayne shoot-‘em-ups were staged).

Along the way, Diamond identifies various roles that Indian characters have been assigned in movies to fit cultural (read that: white) expectations.

In the silent era, it was the “noble native.” During the Depression came the “brutal savage,” usually vanquished by stalwart Westerners such as John Wayne. In the age of civil rights, we saw the emergence of the “dead Injun,” whose extermination was an emblem of social injustice. And later came the appearance of the “groovy wise man,” a rebellious proto-hippie figure in touch with nature and personified in films such as “Billy Jack.”

Meanwhile, Diamond notes the paradox of juicy Indian roles in films going to white actors such as Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds and Elvis Presley, and the supreme irony of iconic Indian figure Iron Eyes Cody (of the “Keep America Beautiful” ad campaign) being of Sicilian heritage.

Along the way, Diamond inserts various talking-head signposts in interviews with outspoken activists and actors such as Russell Means and John Trudell and notes some significant cultural events (the occupation of Wounded Knee, Marlon Brando’s sending Sacheen Littlefeather to turn down his best-acting Oscar) that have fueled the distorted media mythologizing of native peoples.

And Diamond aptly wraps up his journey by acknowledging a new generation of young Indian actors (Graham Greene, Adam Beach, Gary Farmer, etc.) and moviemakers telling stories in their own, inimitable voices in films such as Chris Eyre’s “Smoke Signals” and Zacharias Kunik’s “Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.”

While “Reel Injun” perhaps meanders too much to be a definitive study on the subject, it achieves in the bemused, ironic voice of its maker a bittersweet honesty and an entertaining point of view that focuses much-needed attention on Hollywood’s long-held confusion over what it is to be a real Indian.

- Dennis King

Some iconic movie directors’ off-screen lives seem so large, dramatic and event-packed that they threaten to overshadow their works on screen. Big, brawling, boozing, men’s-men directors such as Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks boast colorful, rousing, trouble-filled private biographies that seem positively Heminwayesque in competition with their creative lives.

Certainly, John Huston is a charter member of that macho fraternity, and his rich, raucous personal and professional experiences get a thorough, entertaining chronicling in “John Huston: Courage and Art” (Crown Archetype, $30), the first complete biography of the legendary filmmaker by prolific biographer Jeffrey Meyers, author of acclaimed studies of Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and many others.

Making ample use of original interviews with Huston’s Hollywood cronies and his children and relatives, as well as newly opened archival materials, the biographer offers up a vivid portrait of a truly great filmmaker (whose classics range through “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Asphalt Jungle” and “The African Queen”) and a larger-than-life adventurer and raconteur (at various times he was a champion boxer, a bullfighter, a big-game hunter and fisherman, a soldier, a gambler and a legendary womanizer).

Meyers colorfully details the Missouri-born Huston’s early life as a sickly child, son of famed actor Walter Huston, and how through sheer force of will young John one day rose from his sickbed, dove from a waterfall into a raging river and determined to pursue a strenuous life.

Though he dropped out of high school, Huston found success as an actor in the 1920s and a screenwriter in the 1930s, before making a dazzling debut behind the camera with 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon.” In a astoundingly productive directing career that yielded 37 feature films, 15 Oscar nominations and two Oscar wins (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Lifetime Achievement), plus directing turns that earned his father Walter (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and daughter Anjelica Huston (“Prizzi’s Honor”) acting Oscars, Huston also managed to live a life off-screen that rivaled any adventures he captured on film.

In addition to his vigorous outdoors and sporting adventures, Huston directed plays on Broadway and operas at La Scalia and engaged in rigorous political causes (he was a staunch opponent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts in Hollywood). He was a serious painter and art collector, a connoisseur of wine, food and literature (many of his great films were adaptations of novels), and an unabashed womanizer (he married five times to successively younger wives, and all ended badly).
So it doesn’t sound like hyperbole when Meyers calls Huston “one of the most fascinating men who ever lived.”

Indeed, as this fine and literate biography points out, Huston’s life was as ambitious as his art, and his art is truly enduring.

Meyers neatly sums up the creative drive and grit to the very end that Huston maintained in his remarkable life:

“Huston’s most outstanding quality was personal courage: braving the waterfall as a childhood invalid in Arizona, filming under fire in the Aleutians and in Italy, opposing the Communist witch hunt in Washington, shooting ‘The African Queen’ and ‘The Roots of Heaven’ under dangerous conditions in Africa, hunting elephants in Africa and tigers in India, riding recklessly in fox hunts in Ireland, winning a camel race in Nevada, marrying for the fifth time, making ‘Under the Volcano,’ ‘Prizzi’s Honor’ and ‘The Dead’ while confined to a wheelchair, gasping for breath and supported by a tank of oxygen.”

- Dennis King

He was one of early Hollywood’s so-called “He-man” directors (along with Howard Hawks, John Ford and John Huston). He sported an eye patch and a dashing panache that earned him the affectionate nickname “the one-eyed bandit.” And he lived a life off-screen that was every bit as rugged, momentous and adventurous as the classic film stories he told on screen.

But compared to his more celebrated colleagues in that rough-and-tumble director’s fraternity, Raoul Walsh is today an odd man out. Despite a resume that includes such bona-fide classics as “High Sierra,” “White Heat,” “The Naked and the Dead” and despite having tracked down bandit Pancho Villa, discovered John Wayne and faced down gangster Bugsy Siegel, Walsh’s exploits have been largely forgotten.

That should be remedied somewhat with the publication of “Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director” (University Press of Kentucky, $40), the first full-length biography of the flamboyant director by film historian Marilyn Ann Moss.

In his time, Walsh (1887-1980) was regarded as one of the fledgling film industry’s most creative, daring and iconoclastic directors. His career behind the camera spanned a half century and ran from the one- and two-reel silents to the rebellious, cutting-edge 1960s and through many genres (gangster films such as “White Heat” and “The Roaring Twenties,” action movies like “They Died With Their Boots On,” war pictures such as “Objective Burma!” on through Westerns and even romances).
Moss covers the critical aspects of Walsh’s filmmaking with a thorough, thoughtful precision. But the most compelling and surprising aspects of her book focus on Walsh’s amazing life off screen.

During his youth in New York City, Walsh’s parents hobnobbed with the cultural elite – including artist Frederick Remington, President Teddy Roosevelt, showman Buffalo Bill and actor Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes Booth). The young Walsh got his start in Hollywood as an assistant director and cameraman to D.W. Griffith, and he even acted the role of John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s 1915 landmark film “The Birth of a Nation.”

Moss uncovers some amazing facts and rich anecdotes to color her portrait of this singular movie pioneer – touching on his close friendship and collaboration with swashbuckler Errol Flynn; his decision to change actor Marion Morrison’s name to John Wayne and cast him in “The Big Trail”; his encounter with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and his efforts to persuade Villa to make his life story into a movie; and his manly endeavors away from Hollywood that included cowpunching, hard drinking and enough adventure to truly make him a two-fisted legend.

Moss notes that Walsh is perhaps the last of the founding filmmakers in Hollywood who had been without a full, comprehensive biography.

“Walsh’s one hundred and forty films created a classic cinema of adventure, romance and American hard knocks both vigorous and tenderhearted,” Moss notes. “His films moved to the rhythm of bullets and came at audiences with style and energy… he helped to transform the Hollywood studio yarn into a breathless art form. He belongs to that generation of filmmakers who learned to make movies on a dime in a fledgling industry at the start of the Twentieth century and invented a Hollywood that made movies bigger than life itself.”

- Dennis King

Most people would guess that an historical accounting of cinema shot in the Sooner State would just about fill a pamphlet, but John Wooley has filled a revelatory and richly readable 309-page book with facts about rolling film in red dirt country.

“Shot in Oklahoma: A Century of Sooner State Cinema” reveals a long record of movies filmed in the Land of the Red Man, dating as far back as 1904. That was the year inventor Thomas Edison himself, the American movie studio pioneer, sent a film crew to Oklahoma’s 101 Ranch near Ponca City, seeking to capture authentic Western atmosphere on celluloid.

Many people who’ve lived in Oklahoma for any significant length of time might recall that Francis Ford Coppola brought young unknown actors such as Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane to Tulsa to film “The Outsiders” and “Rumblefish” (both released in 1983), based on novels by Oklahoma author S.E. Hinton. They might also be aware that director Barry Levinson brought Cruise back to Oklahoma, along with Dustin Hoffman, to shoot scenes for the Oscar-winning “Rain Man” in 1988, and that the big-budget disaster movie “Twister” (1996), with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, was shot in Wakita, Guthrie and several other state locations. And that’s about all that most folks know.

Fascinating details

But meticulously researched details of many older and/or lesser-known features shot in the Sooner state make for fascinating and informative reading, especially for film buffs and movie trivia fans who live here.

The book’s cover, for example, is taken from a poster hawking a low-budget 1950 Western called “Rock Island Trail,” a Republic picture shot mostly in Hollywood, with some outdoor action scenes filmed along a stretch of abandoned railroad track near McAlester. Its star, Forrest Tucker, is pictured leaping from the front of a locomotive with a six-gun in his hand and a savage look on his face. Great cover. Enhances the book’s title perfectly.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans filmed 1946′s “Home in Oklahoma” around the Arbuckle Mountains, and Roy and Dale actually came back to the Sooner State and got married on a cattle ranch in the area the very next year.

I was intrigued that a Western project called “Osage,” starring, among others, Tulsa Western swing ace Johnnie Lee Wills and actress Noel Neill, who would later play Lois Lane on the first “Superman” TV series, was shot in part around Pawhuska, but never completed.

I was surprised to learn that parts of the wildcat oil boom drama “Tulsa” (1949), starring Robert Preston and Susan Hayward, were shot on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, and even a small bit of John Ford’s 1940 film version of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” — a book vehemently denounced by Sooner citizens and politicians alike for its depiction of Dust Bowl Okies — was quietly filmed around the Beckham County courthouse in Sayre.

Fun stuff from Wooley, one of the most prolific and popular of Oklahoma writers, a former Tulsa World entertainment writer, novelist and author of many music- and movie-related books and articles rooted in Okie culture. “Shot in Oklahoma” is published in paperback by the University of Oklahoma Press with a list price of $16.95.

— Gene Triplett

DeMille is a name still synonymous with grand Hollywood film epics of biblical proportions and a film culture built on dazzling star power and hugely ambitious storytelling. And the man, Cecil B. DeMille, appears to have lived a life as large and grand and ambitious as any of his classic big-screen creations.

In journalist Scott Eyman’s sweeping new biography, “Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille” (Simon & Schuster, $36), the author makes use of previously unreleased letters and papers from DeMille’s estate to create a portrait of the filmmaker that is richly detailed, scholarly and exhaustive while still being enjoyably readable.

Eyman, books editor at the Palm Beach Post and author of several well-regarded biographies of film industry giants (most notably Louis B. Mayer and John Ford), employs loads of juicy anecdotes, insightful analytical assessments and a keen sense of Hollywood history to provide a vibrant, vivid portrait of a larger-than-life man driven by maddening contradictions.

Although DeMille was a devoted family man, he was known to have maintained affairs with three mistresses during a career that spanned 50 years. Although he was an early film innovator, he opted for glitzy showmanship over artistry in the bulk of his works. Although he was a firm believer in free expression, he emerged during the McCarthy era as a conservative reactionary. Although he was an impeccable judge of talent, his body of films also reveals that he was just as often a sucker for kitsch and laughably corny dialogue (witness Anne Baxter to Charlton Heston in the 1956 version of “The Ten Commandments”: “Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!”).

DeMille (1881-1959) began his film career in 1912 in partnership with Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn). Their company turned out an array of silent-era successes (including “The Squaw Man,” widely considered the first feature-length Hollywood picture), most directed by DeMille himself.

Although his influence has diminished in recent years, Eyman writes that DeMille’s impact on the evolution of film as a powerful, popular art form cannot be understated. DeMille, the author writes, “incarnated the world’s idea of Hollywood: gleefully dramatic, willfully unsophisticated, exuberantly, joyously excessive. He transcended his individual identity to become the living embodiment of the movie director and, beyond that, the embodiment of Hollywood itself.”

Eyman offers up lots of vignettes demonstrating DeMille’s appetite for bigger and bigger productions, his taste for bombast and spectacle and his prodigious command of cinematic technique. In works as iconic as “The Ten Commandments” (the 1923 original and the 1956 remake), “King of Kings” and his 1952 Oscar-winner “The Greatest Show on Earth,” DeMille’s virtually defined the term Hollywood epic.

And true to his flair for the dramatic, the director also dabbled from time to time in front of the camera. His most famous acting turn came under the directing eye of Billy Wilder in the 1950 masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” in which DeMille memorably played himself opposite Gloria Swanson’s insanely deluded old actress Norma Desmond.

It’s a glorious bit of meta-Hollywood lore that proved, behind the camera or in front of it, Cecil B. DeMille was always ready for his close-up.

Other biographies by Scott Eyman include “Mary Pickford: From Here to Hollywood,” “Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer,” “Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford,” “Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise” and “The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930.”

- Dennis King

In the opening piece of his wonderful new book of essays, “Warning Shadows,” critic Gary Giddins delivers a riveting master class on the history of movies, their rapid evolution and their potent influence on popular culture.

Giddins, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for “Visions of Jazz” and author of “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams,” is a highly regarded, award-winning jazz critic, cultural writer and biographer who now turns his sights on classic films recently released on DVD and illuminates them anew with deft analysis, acute insight and stylish prose.

“Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema” (W.W. Norton & Company, $18.95) begins with a comprehensive essay on the way we watch “moving pictures” – from the early nickelodeons and works from Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio to the Hollywood studio era with its opulent movie palaces to the advent of home video technologies and on-line streaming video.

All through history, movie going has been constantly changed by rapidly developing technologies (sound, color, widescreen, 3-D, digitalization). Other cultural factors, such as censorship and the Production Code and the rivalry of radio, television and the internet, have also profoundly altered the way we view movies and integrate them into our lives.

Particularly startling, Giddins notes, is the way home video has changed movies from communal experiences to intensely private activities. Laughter and tears, the common language of movies, now occur in the confines of the living room instead of the open arena of a theater auditorium.

After setting the stage with this concise and eye-opening introduction, Giddins launches into a wide-ranging examination of cinema, taking in some well-worn classics and some overlooked gems. His precise eye falls on the work of such great directors as Ernst Lubitsch, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa and such workhorse stars as Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and James Stewart, finding new aspects of their movies to examine with relaxed wit and piercing perception.

In some 70 pithy essays – ranging from horror to film noir, from biopics to musicals, from animation to literary adaptations – the author manages to discover quirks and revealing magic that render even familiar old chestnuts fresh and surprising. A perusal of essay titles (drawn from his DVD columns in the New York Sun and the DGA Quarterly) reveals Giddins’ scope: “Joan Crawford Is Dangerous,” “God Is in the House, Maybe” (Ingmar Bergman), “Prestige and Pretense” (“Pride and Prejudice”), “Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!”

The great French director Bertrand Tavernier recognizes the value of Giddins’ perspective and notes that he “never recycles clichés, he questions the clans and the cliques, and he writes very well of actors and actresses.”

Giddins clearly is a master essayist as well as an astute critic and enthusiastic movie lover. Reading his words is a pleasure, and his far-reaching essays are sure to be a joy for any cinematic fellow traveler. But his sharply erudite opening essay alone is worth the price of the book.

- Dennis King