Film & History 40.1: Book Reviews Spring 2010 subsequent dialog occurring nearer the filmmaker’s death includes amber- tinted memories of personal associations with numerous actors, actresses, and production workers, and fond reflection over professional triumphs such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, (1957) Lawrence of Arabia, (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). It is noteworthy that many of the interviews in this volume differ in spelling, reflecting both the English and American vernacular. Also, the editor has quite properly included some interviews that contain repetitive questions and answers in order to provide both the student and casual reader with valuable content that might otherwise have been lost through editing. The first interview, entitled “David Lean on What You Can Learn from Movies” authored by Charles Reynolds for the magazine Popular Photography in 1958 contains simple and straightforward advice for amateur filmmakers about how the technical aspects of a film’s execution should not be obvious to the viewer: “I think that really good film making conceals technique,” opines Lean. “If a film is really successful, the audience should be so caught up in it that they do not notice how it was made.” Lean’s pursuit of excellence is clearly evident in Mary Blume’s 1970 interview with the filmmaker found on pages 34-38 in Organ’s book, though Blume writes that the very word ‘perfectionist’ makes Lean shudder. “I go on and on trying to get what I hoped from a scene,” Lean explains. “If I know 50 percent is wrong, I go on and on as long as the actors can take it, even if I finally only get 10 percent more. It’s damned hard even to get 70 percent of your hopes.” The book closes with Kevin Brownlow’s 1990 colloquy with Lean, which reveals an aging professional satisfied with his lifework, yet still unwilling to abandon his craft in order to embrace some form of retirement: “I always feel at home behind a movie camera. I really do. There are horrible moments, of course, when you don’t know what to do . . . but on the whole, I’ve had a wonderful time with my hand on a movie camera. I just love it and I feel at home. It is my friend.” Perhaps the only criticism worthy of mention concerning David Lean: Interviews is the glaring absence of photographs, especially considering the critical acclaim heaped from all corners upon many of Lean’s iconic screenplays, and the filmmaker’s rather large body of work. This minor oversight aside, Interviews is a useful reference for historian and film aficionado alike and an enjoyable, fitting testament to one of the world’s greatest visual artists. Edward R. Schmidtke schmidtkeer@my.hiram.edu ___________________________ Robert Shail, Editor. Seventies British Cinema. Palgrave, 2008. 188 pages. $85.00. 102 As a collection, Seventies British Cinema is cognizant of its place in the history of British film culture scholarship. Editor Robert Shail channels Alan Lovell’s late 1960s pronouncement of an “unknown” cinema in Britain (a counter-tradition astride the polite cinema of bourgeois respectability), suggesting that as a decade, films produced in the 1970s represent one of the last uncharted territories in the field (xi). In his chapter “From Amicus to Atlantis: The Lost Worlds of 1970s British Cinema,” James Chapman reminds of Julian Petley’s discussion of marginalized British film genres— what he had called a “lost continent”—that were waiting for