SOURCE: “Everlasting Watch, But Movieless,” in The Spectator, November 28, 1992, p. 49.

In the following review, Adair offers unfavorable assessment of Screening History, which he describes as “a rambling, inconsequential book that fails absolutely to do justice to its title.”

The very first, mock-solemn sentence of Screening History unfurls in front of the reader’s eyes like a tiny red carpet, one that is then pulled out gently from beneath him:

As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.

Gore Vidal, unmistakably.

Just as unmistakable, alas, in the pseudo-stately tread of the prose, is the narcissistic grimace of self-parody. This slender book, all 97 pages of it, is interesting in so far as it is the closest its author has ever come to writing an autobiographical memoir; interesting...