Book Review: City of Nets by Otto Friedrich

Bertolt Brecht testifying before HUAC

Otto Friedrich's City of Nets is an impressive survey history of Hollywood in the 1940s. By a survey history, I mean Friedrich did not do any primary research for the book, but relied on secondary sources. Friedrich takes a perverse pride in having done no interviews for the book. As he puts:

         Surely there is no one of any importance in Hollywood, dead or alive, who has not been

          interrogated over and over again. And in no other field of history, not in Hitler's Berlin

          or in Roosevelt's Washington, have so many interviews grown into so many

          ghost-written autobiographies. (pg. xi)

                              

Almost forty years have elapsed since Friedrich wrote these words and we have been even more deluged since. I recently plowed my way through the 768 pages of Hollywood: The Oral History and was shocked by how few nuggets I gleaned and how anodyne the result was. Still, I will read almost anything about the titans of Hollywood's Golden Age. Peter Biskind's My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles is scurrilous bunkum, but it conveys the spirit of the subjects. So, you pays your money and you take your chance.

Friedrich majored in history at Harvard and gives City of Nets a sense of historical sweep. The book is the best survey history I've read since Eric Foner's Reconstruction. Friedrich is tart and economical, a much more stylish writer than most historians. Friedrich worked primarily as a journalist, he was The Saturday Evening Post's last managing editor, and City of Nets' bibliography is impressively lengthy and wide-ranging: from Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon to Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience, from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to Lana Turner's Lana: The Lady, The Legend, The Truth. Friedrich is a scrupulous and appropriately incredulous scholar. When perspectives differ on events, he is only too glad to provide contrasting viewpoints. He is especially strong on the Hollywood émigré community, American anti-Semitism, and the decline of the film business. Some aspects of the book have dated. City of Nets' sections on HUAC and the rise of the blacklist don't give us as full and rich picture as J. Hoberman's An Army of Phantoms.

The only facet of the book that stuck in my craw was Friedrich's condescension to the fruits of Hollywood labor. Neil Gabler picked up on this in his 1986 review in The New York Times. Friedrich opines that "MGM was in the business of producing rubbish." (pg. 318) A flippant judgement that I might be more inclined to agree with if he had replaced the word rubbish with kitsch. I do take exception to his opinion that "To Have and Have Not wasn't a particularly good movie." (pg. 242) Friedrich's  highbrow view of Hollywood's output was, and still is, commonplace amongst American intellectuals. It is why Friedrich gravitates to portraying practitioners of what were then known as the high arts who ended up in Hollywood: Faulkner, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Mann, and Brecht whose Mahagonny provides City of Nets with its title. Émigré directors are mentioned once in passing: Siodmak, Renoir, Clair, Ophuls, and Duvivier. Douglas Sirk draws nary a mention.

Despite my auteurist demurrals, City of Nets is a worthy book. It belongs on the shelf with those authors who have given us the most compelling portraits of twentieth century LA: Hammett, Chandler, Babitz, Didion, Ellroy, Mosely and Jean Stein's West Of Eden.