MARTIN SCORSESE

Kelly's second book on the acclaimed director has the same patchwork quality as her Martin Scorsese: The First Decade (1980- -not reviewed). Billed as an ``oral history,'' it's really a compendium of quotations from Scorsese and his friends, family, and collaborators. Still, despite the limitations of the genre, Kelly manages to elicit some valuable production history and interpretive comments from her many interviewees, who range from Scorsese's ever- loquacious parents to the usually tight-lipped Robert De Niro, with whom Scorsese has created some of the greatest films of our time, from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver through Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Many of the actors who have worked with Scorsese celebrate here his remarkable directorial style, as do the technicians who marvel at his mastery of the form and his meticulous preparation. Others testify to his absolute devotion to the movies, a fervor matched by the religious intensity in many of his films. Kelly, who studied to become a nun, no doubt overworks the priestliness of Scorsese's vocation in her own prose interludes, much as she spends too much time detailing her personal encounters with the director. (Photos by her husband include two of her and Scorsese.) And the platitudes here by studio execs (Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner) are particularly worthless, as are the testimonial-dinner remarks that pass for forewords by Scorsese's director friends Steven Spielberg and Michael Powell. Vague references to personal problems in Scorsese's life remind us how little these interviews tell us about the man. That's exactly the sort of identity crisis this book suffers from—it aspires to critical seriousness but delivers mostly starlust.