by Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up!
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”
-John Greenleaf Whittier
There have been innumerable books about the greatest films ever made, (my personal favorites are Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies Volumes I, II and III; a series that will sadly not continue), and some of the worst, (I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie and Your Movie Sucks, also by the late, great Mr. Ebert). But what about ambitious ventures by visionary auteurs that for one reason or another never made it to the silver screen, (some films dying just short of completion, others never getting off the drawing board, and it may surprise you it is not always small, unknown directors, but big names like Spielberg, Leone and Hitchcock who are involved)? In The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See author Simon Braund tries to give them their proper due.
The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See is series of articles by sixteen writers, including Braund, who serves primarily as the book’s editor, (he wrote the introduction as well). Each piece covers one film project, runs anywhere from two to five pages, includes photographs and mock-ups of posters, (some of which are pretty cool, others not so much), and has a rating system from one to ten measuring the odds that the motion picture in question will ever be released.
The problem I had with The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See is that the writing style is more like that of a blog, (although at least a decent blog). The writing quality, however, is inconsistent, (probably because so many people worked on it). Some parts have personality, with witty observations and amusing asides, others are bland, dull and uninteresting, which at times can make reading Greatest an exercise in frustration. And a number of the films didn’t seem all that great to me. In fact, a few of them sounded pretty lousy, (especially Jerry Lewis’ horrific misfire, the completed but never released The Day the Clown Cried).
The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See reminded me of a book I read a few years ago, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made by David Hughes, the difference being Hughes’ far superior effort was considerably less terse, (it discussed fewer films, but had additional details), more skillfully crafted, and although it was limited to the science fiction genre, it taught me more about the pitfalls of movie making than Braund’s book. In fact many of the movies in Sci-Fi are also in Greatest, but oddly enough Sci-Fi does not appear in the bibliography as a source, (instead there is another book by Hughes listed, Tales from Development Hell, which I have not read).
Ultimately, because of its structure and narrow subject matter, I can see The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See as little more than a cinephile’s bathroom reader. For more serious fare I suggest the aforementioned books by Roger Ebert and David Hughes’ The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made.
