Sep. 11, 1976: 26

‘Wide-eyed’, Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd reviews The Devil Finds Work.

“Baldwin has always possessed a ‘white’, or at least nourgeois, imagination which has been enriched by the language of his early store-front faith and by the rhetoric of his own self-indulgence. In other words, his is a literary sensibility and the characteristically turns to those films which have been make ‘out of’ novels. Again, ‘the language of the cinema is also the language of our dreams’–giving him the freedom to become even more allusive and self-concerned. This is a book more for those who read Baldwin than for those who go to the cinema.”