Ace film blogger Farran Smith Nehme’s first novel grows directly out of her adoration of classic American cinema.

By Gerald Peary

I’ve never met Farran Smith Nehme but I admire her from afar, Boston to New York. Since 2005, she’s the voice of an extraordinarily winning film blog, The Self-Styled Siren, a beautifully written and argued appreciation of the films, directors, and actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, 1930-1960. Nehme on the Web is smart, sharp, and stylish. Reading her learned and good-humored retro essays, I recall the pleasure I had forty years ago following the weekly columns of film critic Molly Haskell in the Village Voice.

Nehme is now the author of Missing Reels (Overlook Press, $26.95), a first novel which grows directly out of her adoration of classic American cinema. Ceinwen, her heroine, probably couldn’t be more autobiographical. She’s a film-crazy transplant to New York from the deep South (Nehme is from Alabama) who bounces around Manhattan’s creaky rep houses — St. Marks Theatre, the Thalia, etc. — wherever old Hollywood movies are unspooling. Though it’s the 1980s, Ceinwen opts for old-time studio helmers like Leo McCarey and Howard Hawks; and she’s the gal who can tell you that Stanley Cortez was the cinematographer of Night of the Hunter, and who were the second bananas cast as the frenzied, fast-talking Fourth Estate in His Girl Friday.

Author Nehme is also an activist in the world of film preservation. Her cause is finding and restoring obscure American features, and she’s managed to raise the money to do it. I salute her. In Missing Reels, Ceinwen becomes obsessed with films which have fallen off the charts: the legion of silent movies that have disappeared, perhaps forever. A romantic cause. And here’s the main plot of the novel: Ceinwen, living on Avenue C with two gay roommates, becomes convinced that the snooty, reclusive elderly woman in an upstairs apartment is actually a Hollywood actress from the silent era. She tames Miriam long enough to learn of her neighbor’s entanglement with German refugee director, Emil Arnheim, and of Arnheim’s lost 1928 film for Civitas Studios, an ambitious rendition of Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Making like Nancy Drew, Ceinwen goes on the trail of silent movie collectors, trying to discover if a print of The Mysteries of Udolpho is somehow extant. And if so, is it an undiscovered masterpiece? Perhaps Arnheim is a great “auteur” filmmaker, an émigré director worthy of comparisons with Stroheim and Sternberg?

OK, the hard part. Nehme, the novelist, is not up there yet with Nehme, the brilliant essayist. Missing Reels is the breezy, efficient work of a popular journalist, not The Last Tycoon or Day of the Locust or The Player literary fiction. It veers dangerously close to that disparaged category of writing, the “chick” novel. Certainly, Nehme’s most effective creations are the key female characters, Ceinwen and Miriam, though several other women are caricatured. All the male characters are thinly drawn, including Ceinwin’s roomies and her math professor Brit boyfriend.

The real disappointment is how half-hearted is Nehme’s recreation of the arcane, somewhat crackpot world of silent movie worshippers and/or collectors. Couldn’t she have done more research and interviews, including perhaps a visit to the Pordenone Film Festival in Italy, where the pre-1929 film lovers gather annually? Or easier, attend some meetings of the Sons of the Desert, Laurel and Hardy adulators?

Or maybe she could have talked to someone like me. I have vivid memories of the collector world, from the time in the 1970s I was doing research on several early cinema projects. For a book on the films of Rita Hayworth, I needed to see her obscure Columbia works. Enter collectors, who owned these on 35mm. For a small fee, one 1930s Hayworth was projected for me (Was it Girls Can Play? Paid To Dance? The Game That Kills?) at a private cinema in Manhattan, and the other attendees were members of a coterie film club. They were old, they were pale, they all were men. Their obsession was the actors in each movie, knowing all their names. I was greeted with a mimeographed sheet with the full cast of this Hayworth “B” movie, and I do mean full. Probably forty actor names, and the parts they played, however brief.

I will never forget this. At one point in this picture, Rita hails a taxi and, for some reason, the taxi tips over. As the driver of the taxi crawls to safety through a window, his face shows for a second. In unison, the audience, 35 strong, proudly yelled out the bit actor’s name! (I never heard of this guy.)

Back to Missing Reels. Nehme needed to deal with William K. Everson.

What Roger Ebert is to Web critics, the late NYU professor of cinema was to film collectors for many decades. A hero of heroes. “Bill” Everson. Researching my Ph.D. dissertation on silent gangster films, I contacted him about seeing a couple of very hard-to-find works. Famously generous, he invited me to his New York apartment, set up with two projectors for 35mm screenings. We watched the movies together, and then Everson asked if I’d stay on to see two other films of his choosing, both from 1932. We watched. They were indifferent genre works. Everson seemed delighted with them. Like many collectors I met, he knew every fact about rare movies but had little concern, or aesthetic feel, for which were good or bad.

What was he like? Thin and pale and non-assertive. A very kind man. And yes, he fit the eccentric stereotype. He had 35mm canisters everywhere in every room and hallway. I believe some were stored in his bathtub.

Several times in Missing Reels, Everson is mentioned. Ceinwen thinks of contacting him in her search for The Mysteries of Udolpho. But it’s a tease: a fictionalized Everson is never introduced, though, to me, his appearance in the book is essential. Nobody better embodied the peculiar ways of the passionate movie collector.

Besides the sleuth plot and the movie plot of Missing Reels, a lot of the book is a conventional romantic story about Ceinwen’s on-and-off relations with Matthew, the math prof. Matthew’s problem is that he has a fiancée abroad, Anna, a straight-laced economist, whom he just won’t let go. So most of the book he two-times her with Ceinwen. Well, Ceinwen is much too forgiving of his cheating nature, and so I think is Nehme. Matthew’s side is always defended and Anna is mocked, even if she’s faithful to him and he’s an unapologetic philanderer. Hmm. Maybe Ceinwen in the 1980s could have used a dose of Molly Haskell’s 1970s feminism.

Gerald Peary is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston, curator of the Boston University Cinematheque, and the general editor of the “Conversations with Filmmakers” series from the University Press of Mississippi. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of 9 books on cinema, writer-director of the documentary For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism, and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess