- Born
- Died
- Birth nameRobert Paul Wood
- Robin Wood was born on February 23, 1931 in Richmond, Surrey, England, UK. He was married to Aline Macdonald. He died on December 18, 2009 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
- SpouseAline Macdonald(1960 - 1974) (divorced, 3 children)
- His lack of any sense of humor, about which he sometimes made jokes.
- Film historian, author and academic.
- His first published film essay was an examination of the themes of sex, money, death, and compulsion in Psycho (1960).
- He earned a degree in English at Cambridge, and started out teaching at secondary schools in the UK and France. At one school, he started a film club and encouraged students to write their own reviews.
- He always acknowledged the influence of the famous literary critic and academic F.R. Leavis upon his writing, although Leavis was famously uninterested in (and even sometimes antagonistic towards) the cinema.
- If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be "Rio Bravo".
- A light entertainment can have depth, subtlety, finesse, it can embody mature moral values; indeed, it seems to me that it must.
- [on the films of Howard Hawks]:It is distressing that one should have to remind people that a great work of art can be, at least on certain levels, immediately accessible and pleasurable, but, in the age of Beckett and Burroughs, of "Finnegans Wake" and "Marienbad", it has become necessary. We must beware of dismissing Hawks's films because we enjoy them.
- [on "High Noon"]: It strikes me as the archetypal 'Oscar' film, product of the combined talents of the archetypal 'Oscar' director (Zinnemann), the archetypal 'Oscar' writer (Carl Foreman) and the archetypal 'Oscar' producer (Stanley Kramer): three gentlemen whose work has been characterized by those Good Intentions with which we understand the road to Hell to be paved.
- [on Luis Bunuel] Society, he suggests, condemns the abnormalities that it has itself produced; his refusal to be shocked by anything is refreshing and liberating.
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