In this essay collection David Lazar looks to our intimate
relationships with characters, both well-known and lesser known,
from Hollywood's Golden Age. Veering through considerations of
melancholy and wit, sexuality and gender, and the surrealism of
comedies of the self in an uncanny world, mixed with his own
autobiographical reflections of cinephilia, Lazar creates an
alluring hybrid of essay forms as he moves through the movies in
his mind. Character actors from the classical era of the 1930s
through the 1950s including Thelma Ritter, Oscar Levant, Martin
Balsam, Nina Foch, Elizabeth Wilson, Eric Blore, Edward Everett
Horton, and the eponymous Celeste Holm all make appearances in
these considerations of how essential character actors were, and
remain, to cinema.
