Preston Neal Jones, Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter (Limelight, $18.95 paper). This 2002 oral history of the making of Charles Laughton’s haunting 1955 screen version of Davis Grubb’s novel about an itinerant preacher-murderer (played to nightmarish perfection by Robert Mitchum) is essential reading for anyone who loves the film. It is also one of the few books I’ve read that gives the layman a clear and illuminating picture of exactly what a director does–and why it matters. No matter whether film or live theater is your main interest, you’ll learn things from Heaven and Hell to Play With that most people only find out by taking part in working rehearsals (TT).

Fritz Kreisler: The Charming Maverick (EMI, ten CDs). Kreisler’s playing exuded the spirit of turn-of-the-century Vienna, and this magnificent set, which includes digitally remastered versionf of his classic 78-era recordings of concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruch, Mendelssohn, and Mozart, the complete Beethoven violin sonatas, and a dozen of his own delectable encore pieces, belongs in the collection of every serious music lover. The price is as right as it could possibly be, so break out the Sachertorte and prepare to smile (TT).

Arlene Croce, Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker (University Press of Florida, $24.95 paper). After Edwin Denby’s Dance Writings and Poetry, this 2000 anthology of Croce’s New Yorker reviews is the best single-author collection of dance criticism in print, a volume indispensable to anyone who wants to understand ballet and modern dance in the Seventies and Eighties. Comprehensively informed and passionately, sometimes exasperatingly opinionated, these pieces are now part of history. They’re also sumptuously well written, and I can testify from personal experience that even if you’ve never seen a ballet, they’ll make you want to go right out and discover George Balanchine and Paul Taylor and Mark Morris. I did (TT).

Jascha Heifetz Plays Korngold, Rózsa, and Waxman (RCA Victor Gold Seal). I keep telling people that Miklós Rózsa, who is best known for having scored such Hollywood films as Double Indemnity and Ben-Hur, was also a first-rate classical composer, but somehow the message never seems to seep through. Instead of preaching yet another a sermon, allow me instead to direct you to Jascha Heifetz’s 1956 premiere recording of Rózsa’s Violin Concerto. I once described Rózsa’s music as “user-friendly Bartók,” and that’s not a bad way to sum up this masterly piece, whose musical language recalls the pungently folk-like modal coloration of Bartók but has an astringent romanticism all its own. Not surprisingly, Heifetz played it to the hilt, and this performance, handsomely accompanied by Walter Hendl and the Dallas Symphony, would be worth hearing even if the piece weren’t so good. It’s coupled, logically enough, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Heifetz-commissioned violin concerto and Franz Waxman’s “Carmen” Fantasy. Absolutely not for music-movie buffs only! (TT).

Breach. Is Chris Cooper our best character actor? That thought has occurred to me on more than one occasion, most recently after seeing him in Billy Ray’s 2007 docudrama about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spent two decades peddling government secrets to the KGB. Except for the soppy score, Breach is a tremendously involving film whose makers get everything right–but in the end it is Cooper’s performance that turns a piece of well-crafted entertainment into something not unlike high art. Cooper’s Hanssen is a study in self-loathing arrogance, a fanatical zealot with something unknowably wrong at the core. Somehow I doubt that the real-life Robert Hanssen was half so interesting as the one we meet in Breach. So much the worse for real life (TT).

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor. This 1948 novel about life on a Florida air base nine months before D-Day won the Pulitzer Prize, then slipped through the cracks and has yet to resurface–yet it’s by far the best American novel written by a World War II veteran, the only one that can stand up to direct comparison with Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Tough-minded and stoic, richly detailed yet tautly controlled, Cozzens’ portrait of men and women preparing for war is an unrecognized classic of twentieth-century fiction. Still in print, amazingly enough (TT).

Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 1 (Warner Home Video, five discs). Having just written the libretto for an opera noir, I’m struck by how many of the people I met along the way knew little or nothing of the Hollywood film genre on which The Letter was based. If you’re one of them, the best way to get up to speed is to acquire this immaculately chosen box set, which contains five classics of film noir, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy, Edward Dymytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (a film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely), Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, and Robert Wise’s The Set-Up. It’s all here: the chumps, the dames, the hard-edged backchat, the shadow-stained cinematography, the fear and hopelessness, enacted by the likes of Jane Greer, Sterling Hayden, Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe, Dick Powell, Robert Ryan, and Audrey Totter. Treat yourself to a long weekend of despair (TT).

Louis Kronenberger (ed.), The Portable Johnson and Boswell. This one’s for OGIC, who’s teetering on the edge of reading James Boswell’s magisterial but long-winded Life of Samuel Johnson. In 1955 Louis Kronenberger abridged Boswell’s Life for the Viking Portable series, filling out the volume with a judicious selection of other writings by Johnson and Boswell. This now-forgotten book, which has been out of print for years and years, is an excellent way to experience the Life without braving its occasional longueurs. Used copies are blessedly easy to find (TT).