[Moviola] is less a novel about Hollywood than a misty-eyed recounting of a favourite dream.

Garson Kanin wrote the scripts of the sharpest Hepburn-Tracy comedies. More recently he has been described as the "Boswell of Hollywood"; and in this celebration of a lifetime in the cinema he endeavours to live up to the name. His subject is Benjamin J. Farber, last of the Hollywood moguls and a fictional composite of several of that ilk…. At ninety-two, he is forgetful about most things—but not about the history of Hollywood, of which he has total recall…. Mr Kanin's narrative problem is to accommodate Ben within what amounts to a series of potted biographies. But the facts intrude into the fiction, and Ben is frequently and inevitably relegated to the role of spectator, conveniently on hand at many of the key Hollywood events.

Large sections of the novel are consequently unpersuasive as fiction, since the reader is required to accept what he knows to be untrue: that Ben was there when Chaplin invented his tramp persona, did produce the classic Keaton films, was a friend and father confessor to Marilyn Monroe…. In Moviola, the reality is too familiar to admit of such imaginative licence: the story is usurped. Every Hollywood party which Ben attends, for instance—and there are many of them—is here accompanied by a long recital of the guest list, with a cameo line or three about each of the guests. Ben is a garrulous reporter and irony is not in his make-up.

This is not to deny the novel's incidental entertainments, which mainly occur in the intervals while Ben is changing the reels of his life's movie. His early career, as a Russian Jewish immigrant who converts his New Jersey dry goods store into a nickleodeon, is described in a detail which holds the attention precisely because it is relatively unfamiliar. There is a fascinating account of Ben's visit to Thomas Edison and his Black Maria studio which conveys a real sense of the anxious attractions of the cinema's pioneering years. And Mr Kanin reminds us what a good dialogue writer he was, as when he describes a garden party at Ben's house with assorted star couples, paired off for croquet, swapping barbed exchanges over the mint juleps about the casting of Scarlett O'Hara. But these are only occasional pleasures in a novel which is too often the victim of its celebratory manner.