While the title is promising—and there's probably no publication with better credentials to compile a chronicle of the Cannes Film Festival than Variety—this anthology makes the mistake of reading like little more than a collection of articles from Variety. That is to say, it's all information and no depth. That would be fine if the information were interesting, but the articles and the look of this thin book suggest that it was assembled in a hurry. Consequently, you get two references to Francis Ford Coppola's tempestuous arrival with Apocalypse Now in 1979, but no account of what happened. And that's saying nothing of an article on the '68 protests that has all the insight of a fifth-grade book report. You do, however, get a rambling account of one writer's favorite restaurant, and lots of old photos and publicity stills, many of which take up two pages for no apparent reason other than that space needed to be filled. If Cannes: Fifty Years Of Sun, Sex & Celluloid was meant to illuminate the significance of Cannes, it fails. And if it was meant to convey what a wild and wonderful place the festival is reputed to be, it also fails. Only glamour hounds and collectors of Jack Lemmon photos from 1982—this book has two!—should take a look.
Words
Cannes: Fifty Years Of Sun, Sex & Celluloid
by The Editors Of Variety
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