By Damien Love published by CreateSpace £14.99

It’s ironic that while Scotland’s indigenous film industry languishes in the doldrums the country has been home to some fine writers on film: Brian Pendriegh, Siobhan Synnot, Hannah McGill, Alan Hunter, Mark Cousins to name a few. Another name that can be added to that list is Damien Love.

Writing for the Sunday Herald (he’s its TV critic), as well as the Guardian, Uncut and Bright Lights Film Journal, Love offers some inspired insights and great anecdotes in this new book. He opens with a short piece on Peg Entwistle, the forgotten suicide blonde who jumped off the letter H of the Hollywood sign when she did not become a star in the 1930s. She was memorialised in the late Dory Previn’s song Mary Cecilia Brown and the Hollywood Sign.

Supporting Features focuses mainly on classic Hollywood. Of the maverick Sam Fuller, Love writes: ‘[he] composed movies the way he might a newspaper piece, peering into his subject with the passion of a crusading tabloid. Allying the lean, urgent sense of story he honed as a reporter to a frenetic primitive-modernist visual sensibility that gave his film a unique, vibrating comic-book slam, he held your fascination in disreputable ways.’ Great stuff!

Of Joan Crawford’s career-saving movie Mildred Pierce Love is equally effusive. He signs off with this: ‘after seeing Mildred Pierce, James M Cain sent [Crawford] a copy of his book [on which the film was based] with a thank you inscribed. The Academy thanked her with her only Oscar. It was the biggest comeback since Easter.’

Love also presents a number of knowledgeable and insightful Q&A interviews with actors including Richard Widmark, Elliott Gould and Harry Dean Stanton, and filmmakers Ray Harryhausen, Roger Corman and Oliver Stone. For film buffs Love has fun with an imagined third sequel to Chinatown and The Two Jakes.

There are also several refreshing profiles (or are they obituaries?) of neglected or misremembered stars like tough guys James Coburn and Sterling Hayden that are revealing, well-observed and provocative. Damien Love captures well the artistry, hokum, and strange mix of compromise and creativity that make up the movies. There’s real passion here – largely of a film world that has all but gone.

How sad it is to read that James Coburn’s final film role was as a voiceover in Monsters Inc.