Talking pictures

From the back cover: This seminal book restores the screenwriter to his true place in the history of American films. The brilliant young critic Richard Corliss aims to correct the imbalance of the auteur theorists, who make the director solely responsible for the film as a work of art. Seeing the writer as a vital, though much ignored, link in film creation, Corliss surveys a hundred motion pictures written by thirty-eight screenwriters, from Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges, and Dalton Trumbo to Terry Southern, Buck Henry, and Jules Feiffer. “The films that receive the highest praise in this book,” he…