Given their comparable movie careers, why is John Wayne still an icon while Gary Cooper is all but forgotten?

Songwriters are the unknown soldiers of popular music. A few, like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, have won lasting fame, but more often than not they labor in the shadows. Unless a songwriter has a parallel career as a performer, as did Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, he does his job behind…

Of the making of books about Franklin D. Roosevelt, there is no end—and nearly all of them are admiring, often to the point of outright adoration. It started with the memoirists, most of whom took the utmost care to paper over Roosevelt’s flaws in their obsequious haste to document their own…

What is America’s greatest contribution to the arts? Time was when many, perhaps most, people would have pointed to the Broadway musical as the likeliest candidate for admission to the pantheon. Theatergoers around the world have long rejoiced in the delights of the genre, including some whom one…

Get Real

Homer & Langley

Friendlyvision

Just Enough Liebling

IF YOU LONG TO MEET ODD PEOPLE, it's hard to top Manhattanites who go to movies on weekdays. To be sure, I am among their number, but at least I have an excuse: I write about movies. The viewers I have in mind are the pure-hearted obsessives, overwhelmingly male and uniformly unattractive, who…

The Immediate Experience Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture by Robert Warshow Harvard University Press, 302 pp., $18.95 AMONG my prized possessions is a battered copy of Robert Warshow's "The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular…

I don't watch much TV news anymore, but when I heard David Brinkley was retiring, I made a point of tuning in to ABC's This Week to see him say goodbye. It was business as usual for the first 45 minutes or so: One of Marv Albert's lawyers did a star turn, and Roy Romer played his why-we-need-…