In Love with Movies

Starred review from January 10, 2022
In this posthumous work, Talbot (1926–2017) brings back to glittering life the “golden age” of New York City’s art house cinemas with an enchanting look at his life working in film. From opening the Upper West Side’s New Yorker Theater in 1960 to running the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas from 1976 until his death (which was shortly followed by the theater’s shuttering), Talbot details his tenure as a film distributor and exhibitor committed to “eliminat barriers between filmmakers and their audience.” Of his career highlights, he recalls bringing 1985’s Shoah to the U.S. for the first time (a “moral undertaking” that brought the French film commercial success) and renders engrossing sketches of the many directors he worked with—among them Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Louis Malle, whom he helped launch 1981’s My Dinner with André, which ran for 53 weeks and grossed $5 million theatrically. Talbot’s infectious enthusiasm is on full display, perhaps most when he waxes rhapsodic about his favorite comic actors: W. C. Fields was the “Don Quixote of domestic life... voic what others dared not: the shackles of life are infinite, and the best we can do is turn it into comedy.” Film buffs will find much to marvel at in this terrific book.

Starred review from January 1, 2022

Before his death in 2017 at 91, film connoisseur Talbot penned this extraordinary memoir, edited by his wife Toby Talbot (The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies), a tale of his lifelong love affair with movies and the people who make them. After a childhood spent haunting local movie houses, Talbot, a voracious reader, attempted a career in publishing but quickly returned to his first love; under his leadership, the New Yorker Theater flourished. He later branched out into film distribution, founding New Yorker Films in 1965. Talbot focused on foreign and independent films, films with souls that were an extension of society's dreams. His remarkable relationships with directors--Louis Malle (Talbot financed My Dinner with Andr�); Roberto Rossellini; Jean Eustache--make for tantalizing reading, and his enthusiasm for finding the brilliance in obscure films is contagious (his description of Dominique Benicheti's Cousin Jules, a documentary about an octogenarian French peasant couple, is particularly moving). Talbot finds humor in his sometimes-routine job, such as when New York's pickpockets, eager for inspiration, turned out for a screening of Robert Bresson's 1959 Pickpocket. VERDICT Cinephiles will be captivated by Talbot's insights and passion.--Lisa Henry

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