This book deserves five stars just for its research alone, but it has to be said that Barrios grows steadily sourer as the present era starts riding in, like the tide. He doesn't like any show made after 1958 or so, and if you ask me, one of Doris Day's furry best friends must have escaped her palatial pet shelter in Carmel, and bitten Richard Barrios on theass, for there's no other explanation for his vitriol against the Doris Day Rock Hudson movies of the early 60s. Okay, okay, they were inane, but they did not cause cancer! And sometimes he seems unable to explain the results of his research, but unwilling to admit it, so he just blathers on covering his tracks. Maybe spends too much time following market trends (and yet this proved such a fruitful field in his previous book, A SONG IN THE DARK, about the early movie musicals of the late 20s and early 30s)? No one can really explain why so many of the big studio films of the CHILDRENS HOUR/ADVISE AND CONSENT period tanked at the box office, but Barrios just keeps doggedly analyzing and re-analyzing what went wrong.
In every other respect, the book is unforgettably brilliant and, even when I disagree with his conclusions about this or that film, I respect his opinion and I admire the way he writes it up. (Okay, except for Hitchcock's ROPE, much more sympathetic a film than he gives it credit for.) Barrios' style, or banter, is generally persuasive and amusing, and he can summarize the plot of a bad film faster than an old fashioned telegram by Gertrude Stein. And when it comes time for an aria, he really knows how to let go--such as his extended tribute to the "Naked Moon" scene in Cecil B. De Mille's THE SIGN OF THE CROSS.
Book is punctuated by individual star portraits in prose, of Franklin Pangborn, Cecil Cunningham, Clifton Webb, and most hilariously, Bugs Bunny, whose manic androgyny and brattiness finally get their due here. He has gone through the files of the Breen office, the Hays office, every memo Geoffrey Shurlock ever wrote, and he has pored through multiple drafts of studio screenplays to find out how same-sex encodement was pre-censored by officious agencies. They still do this, only nowadays they call it "market research," and Barrios points out how it's the same old story watching Russell Crowe in A BEAUTIFUL MIND, the strands of gay sexuality in the original material as calculatedly snipped out as they were in NIGHT AND DAY or WORDS AND MUSIC. Can't wait to see what Mr. Barrios writes next.