stmichaeladelphi.org

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

New York

In the annals of American furniture before and after the Revolutionary War, the list of core names is brief and overwhelmingly English: Thomas Chippendale, the brothers Adam, Thomas Sheraton and George Hepplewhite are the designers whose work exerted the greatest influence on the American scene. But this pantheon also includes an American, the Scottish-born Duncan Phyfe (1770-1854), the young nation’s most celebrated and original cabinetmaker.

Phyfe and his design legacy represent the glory years of America’s post-Revolution expansion. And during the half-century of Phyfe’s career, New York City was at the center of that growth. This opulent and multifaceted oeuvre is the focus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Duncan Phyfe, Master Cabinetmaker.” Curated by Peter M. Kenny and Michael K. Brown, who are co-authors, with scholars Frances F. Bretter and Matthew A. Thurlow, of an exhibition catalog that is one of the handsomest in recent memory, the show is the first Phyfe retrospective in 90 years. And it offers a sumptuous visual cornucopia. Nearly 100 works from private and public collections—including pieces still owned by Phyfe’s descendants—document the craftsman’s mastery of evolving styles from Federal to Grecian to pillar-and-scroll Classical. Before retiring, Phyfe even put a reluctant toe into the Romantic atmosphere of Gothic revival and ebullient French rococo.

That the Met has not only assembled so many card tables, pier tables, worktables, sofas, chairs, mirrors and cabinet pieces but vividly placed them in their historical context is a curatorial triumph. For instance, a selection of pieces made for the wealthy New Yorkers Robert and Susan Donaldson is displayed with their portraits. Susan Donaldson is portrayed with her harp and one of a pair of Phyfe window seats. The actual pair of seats and the harp are displayed nearby. One of those seats bears Phyfe’s own label, dated July 4, 1826—not only the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but the day on which both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died and the composer Stephen Foster was born.

In addition, there are a number of surviving invoices for specific objects, as well as such related documents as Phyfe’s own surprisingly crude design sketches. By matching these with objects whose history is known, the exhibition and book strive to codify Phyfe’s evolving design traits to help scholars distinguish between the many unsigned Phyfe works and those by his imitators.

There is also Phyfe’s own chest of woodcarving tools, its beautifully veneered interior worthy of cabinetry for a front parlor, the elegantly beveled handle of each tool worn to mellow smoothness by years of use. The chest and its contents are effectively brought to life by a video of Phyfe’s workshop techniques, including veneering, carving and gilding.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A scroll-back armchair from 1807.

Classical proportion, balance and symmetry are Phyfe hallmarks. The delicate floral and cornucopia motifs carved on the crest rails of his earlier Federal period sofas and side chairs recall the work of the great woodcarver Samuel McIntyre of Salem, Mass. In Phyfe’s lyre-back chairs, the lyre features a key-ended tuning pin on the right side and a peg-shaped end on the left, suggesting an authentic musical instrument rather than a mere design motif.

Increasing pomp and opulence distinguish Phyfe’s work from 1815 to 1825, which features richly figured mahogany, kingwood, rosewood, white and colored marble, brass inlay, lavish gilding and finely cast mounts of ormolu (gilt metal). Stern-faced caryatids with gilded wings support card tables, above legs carved as muscular lions’ paws; gilded acanthus leaves curl around the pillars of center tables and sideboards. Several pieces by Phyfe are displayed near similar works by his chief rival, the French émigré Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1779-1819), possibly the only New York maker who could equal Phyfe’s finesse at carving and design. The exhibition shows these two artists dueling with ideas like fencing masters, influencing and sometimes even copying one another. Their competition prompted each to feats of virtuosity: On several tables made when the demand for exotic rosewood trumped Honduras mahogany, carved elements of solid mahogany are paint-grained to mimic rosewood. Only Lannuier’s premature death cut the tournament short.

In an age that lived precariously on credit, Phyfe always paid cash for his materials, laying in sufficient quantities of mahogany timber—known as “Phyfe logs”—to allow the sawed lumber to season far longer than was usual. Thus his tables rarely show cracks and loosened miter joints resulting from wood shrinkage over time. And as ornamentation grew more restrained in the later 1820s, Phyfe concentrated on the glories of large expanses of matched veneers. A notably restrained tilt-top center table is a masterpiece of veneering, the exquisite flame-grained figuration of the circular top achieved with a “book-matched” series of wedge-shaped veneer sections meticulously sliced from a single root crotch of a mahogany tree. This emphasis on veneer over carving characterizes much of Phyfe’s later output, and the inclusion of such veneered pieces as an imposing Grecian bedstead and monumental cheval mirror made in 1841 for an important South Carolina client also underscores Phyfe’s great popularity in the antebellum South.

Meanwhile, one of the lenders to the exhibition, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, has mounted a complementary show, “The World of Duncan Phyfe,” that features pieces lent by private collectors as well as works in the gallery’s own inventory. It was curated by two of the gallery’s principals, Elizabeth and Stuart Feld, who have written their own excellent catalog. The choice furniture is arranged among paintings, girandole mirrors, lamps, porcelain and silver that would once have been prized by the carriage trade knocking on Phyfe’s showroom door.

Because many pieces of so-called American Empire furniture were mass-produced by later, lesser makers than Phyfe and Lannuier, interest in collecting American Classical furnishings has been at a low ebb for several decades. As these refreshing shows reacquaint us with the dignified, sculptural beauty of the finest examples, they may help to reawaken delight in this important period of American design.

Mr. Scherer writes about the fine arts and music for the Journal.

By WILLIAM TRIPLETT

Baltimore

Palimpsests—recycled handwritten books from the Middle Ages—aren’t a particularly big deal. “They’re around,” says Will Noel, curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum here. “What’s rare is finding one that’s interesting.”

The interesting part is always the original text that the recycler (or palimpsester) tried to erase in order to write a new, different book. Occasionally the original text is recovered and proves historically valuable, as in the case of a sixth-century palimpsest found to have been made from a very early copy of the Gospel of St. Luke.

But a palimpsest that contains previously lost writings of not one, not two, but three significant texts dating back to antiquity? “That’s a freak,” Mr. Noel observes.

Such a freak is about to go on exhibit at the Walters beginning Sunday. “Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes” is a palimpsest that mostly contains recovered writings of the great Greek mathematician, but it also includes two other recovered texts that have caught the attention of a variety of scholars. A good chunk of these writings exist nowhere else, any other copies having been lost or destroyed long ago.

“It really is a small ancient library of unique texts,” Mr. Noel says.

Considering the Archimedes palimpsest’s filthy, abused condition upon arrival at the Walters in 1999, and its mysterious travels of nearly 800 years, including a stretch in the hands of forgers, it’s a surprise the irreplaceable relic is much of anything. But thanks to more than 10 years of painstaking conservation efforts, the palimpsest now looks, well, hardly new, but certainly pretty good for all it’s been through.

In 1229, a monk in Jerusalem wanted to make a prayer book, but virgin parchment—the staple of medieval publishing—was hard to come by. So the monk did what most people did at the time—took existing handwritten books, removed the binding, and used a knife to scrape the ink as much as possible from the parchment folios. He then cut the folios in half, rotated them 90 degrees and started writing on them. Eventually he added a new binding, and a palimpsest—derived from the Greek word palimpsestos, meaning “scraped again”—was born.

The monk had used parchment from several books, the principal one a tome of Archimedes’s treatises on math, first written on papyrus in the third century B.C. and then copied into book form around the 10th century, Mr. Noel says.

What happened to the palimpsest for the next 670 years is anyone’s guess, but by the turn of the last century it was in a monastery in Constantinople, where in 1906 remnants of the original ink were identified as the work of Archimedes. But the prayer book disappeared again, turning up three decades later in a private collection in Paris. By then, forgers had painted images of saints on seven pages, trying to make them look as if they, too, dated from 1229.

In 1998 the daughter-in-law of the Parisian collector brought the Archimedes palimpsest, as it had then come to be known, to Christie’s in New York, where it was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for $2 million. Abigail Quandt, senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters, saw a newspaper photograph of the palimpsest—riddled with mold and bacteria, stained with oil, nibbled on by insects, dripped on by candles—and thought, “I wonder who’s going to have to deal with this.”

She got an answer a few months later, when the buyer deposited the palimpsest with the Walters. Ms. Quandt was put in charge of preparing the work for digital imaging, which would highlight any remaining traces of Archimedes’s treatises in addition to the small portion identified in 1906. The preparation, however, demanded a level of excruciating care beyond any she had experienced in her 20 years of manuscript conservation. Just removing the binding and separating the 174 fragile folios took four years alone, followed by countless hours of carefully lifting mold and dirt. The worst: Removing the paintings of saints, which lay atop the prayer book writing, which in turn lay atop the Archimedes undertext.

When a team of four digital-imaging experts from around the country began submitting folios to different wavelengths of light—infrared and ultraviolet, among others—it quickly became clear that no single wavelength would adequately reveal the vestigial ink of the undertext. The team eventually devised a composite wavelength, and the palimpsest began to give up its secrets.

“Only the Archimedes text had been identified to that point,” Mr. Noel says. “But now we started to see there were others.”

The others included entire speeches of the Athenian orator Hyperides, a fourth-century B.C. contemporary of Demosthenes, as well as a detailed commentary, author unknown, on Aristotle’s “Categories,” a fundamental text of Western philosophy.

The big find remained Archimedes’ math treatises—a total of seven, far more than previously known, and two exist in no other form. One addresses the concept of absolute infinity; the other, combinatorics, a segment of math that plays a role in statistical physics and modern computing. No one knew Archimedes had ever broached either subject. Researchers have transcribed and released portions of the seven treatises, whetting some scholarly appetites. “The imminent massive publication of a complete facsimile and transcription will be a huge gift to the study of ancient mathematics,” says Alexander Jones, director of graduate studies at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

Hyperides was among the most influential orators of his time, but until now only fragments of his speeches existed. Already available for review, the recovered full speeches provide “new evidence for the politics and legal practice of Greek city-states at the time of Philip of Macedon’s rise to power, and historians have begun publishing papers on their findings,” says Pat Easterling, Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University.

Not much has survived regarding “Categories,” which scholars know was the subject of intense philosophical debate in the first-century B.C. The commentary found in the palimpsest has offered a wealth of details about that debate, and as a result “it enriches our understanding of an ancient and medieval interpretative tradition regarding the treatise that was considered to be the proper entry route into Aristotelianism,” says David Sedley, a classics professor also at Cambridge. “It is therefore an important addition to our understanding of Aristotelianism.”

Quite possibly the exhibit will show that history itself may be a kind of palimpsest. “Whether you study philosophy or science or whatever,” Mr. Noel says, “the Archimedes palimpsest breaks down boundaries between disciplines. It contains history, philosophy and mathematics, and then all the latest technologies that were applied—the digital imaging, the metadata management—along with all the scholarship. We’d like people to know that because of all these things, history is still being written.”

Mr. Triplett is a writer in Washington.

I have an idea for what I think could be a cool, maybe best-selling novel. I have never written a book before but my high-school and college teachers used to tell me I was a good writer. Do you have any advice for how to get started?

—C.T., New York City

Of the billions of words of advice that writers have given writers over the centuries, my favorite is that of the French short-story virtuoso Guy de Maupassant, who needed only four: “Get black on white.”

A short stroll through the massive library of advice books for writers proves that if there’s anything writers like more than writing, it’s telling other people how to do it. But not surprisingly, no two writers ply their craft the same way. Some writers outline their books, some don’t. Some start with a character, some start with a scene, some (like Charles Dickens) know what the title is going to be before they write a word. Some insist that you should write in longhand; others swear by their laptops. It’s a reminder of W. Somerset Maugham’s statement that “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

If you’re looking for practical advice on, say, how to spin a plot, there’s “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” with templates for 1,462 possible story lines (“A, with the help of B, overcomes an ignoble weakness. A’s gratitude to B blossoms into love, and, when A is sure he has rehabilitated his character, he proposes marriage to B and is accepted”). If you need help developing characters, there’s “Bullies, Bastards and Bitches: How to Write the Bad Guys of Fiction” or “What Would Your Character Do?”: “Your character is trapped in an especially boring day. How does he react? First of all, does he even notice?” I suppose these could be helpful tools for the novice though it’s hard to imagine Tolstoy putting Vronsky through a series of personality tests.

My favorite book of writing advice is the “Modern Library Writer’s Workshop” by Stephen Koch. Mr. Koch presents the basics of the craft for the novice writer including plot, characterization and style; he also recommends some other books on writing, including Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”; Stephen King’s “On Writing”; and Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing.”

A quirkier compendium of advice from writers to writers is “Rules of Thumb: 73 Writers Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations” edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville. There are nuggets of practical advice—”No characters named Brooke or Amber” (Frederick Barthelme); “Your fingernails do not have to be clipped until after the day’s production of words is done” (Robert Olen Butler)—but there is also sage advice about advice. “Thumb-rule number one for aspiring writers, it goes without saying, is: Be wary of writers’ rules of thumb,” wrote John Barth.

In 2010, the Guardian asked a few dozen writers to list their rules for writing fiction. They are fascinatingly diverse in tone and content. Elmore Leonard: “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.” Margaret Atwood: “Nobody is making you do this, so don’t whine.” Anne Enright: “Only bad writers think that their work is really good.” Jonathan Franzen: “It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

I have two pieces of advice. The first is, don’t trust your mother/spouse/lover/best friend’s opinion of your work: They’re lying! They love you and don’t want to hurt your feelings. Find someone who doesn’t care if you ever speak to them again and beg them for the truth. Better yet, pay them to tell you the truth.

Finally, write because it’s fun or entertaining or interesting to write and not because you have visions of royalty checks and literary prizes dancing in your head. The chance of an established publisher buying your first novel is probably about the same as your chance of falling down a well. (Though, like an increasing number of writers, you could try the self-publishing route.) As the prolific and prosperous writer Irwin Shaw once said, “Writing is finally play, and there’s no reason why you should get paid for playing. If you’re a real writer, you write no matter what. No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for it.”

Now get to work.

—Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at booklover@wsj.com.

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Some actors create elaborate imaginary worlds. San Francisco playwright and actor Dan Hoyle painstakingly researches and re-creates the real one.

For his play “The Real Americans,” running at San Francisco’s Marsh Theater Feb. 17 through March 18, Mr. Hoyle spent more than 100 days traveling across the U.S. in a van interviewing the small-town residents Sarah Palin once famously dubbed the “real Americans.”

The final product, a one-man play where Mr. Hoyle impersonates some 15 people ranging from a former drug dealer to a self-described redneck to his own San Francisco hipster friends, is more nuanced than a lampoon of red-state America. It challenges the perspective of what Mr. Hoyle calls the “latte liberal bubble,” and blames the cultural polarization of America on both sides.

Audiences and critics are paying attention. After largely sold-out runs that began in 2010, “The Real Americans” is returning to San Francisco this month after stops in Portland, Ore., Philadelphia, New York and elsewhere. It was nominated in 2010 for a Bay Area Theater Critics Circle award for outstanding solo show.

To create his plays, Mr. Hoyle uses a process that is part journalism, part anthropology and involves simply “hanging out” with the people he wants to feature on stage. “There’s an aspect of what I do that people don’t have the time, money and inclination to do: go out and talk to people,” says the 31-year-old.

Re-creating those characters on stage, including their accents and body language, makes Mr. Hoyle’s work similar to that of Anna Deavere Smith—an actress, playwright and professor known in part for her reportorial-style productions—says Chris Coleman, the artistic director of Portland Center Stage, where “The Real Americans” played for eight weeks in the fall.

“He just seems like this regular, average nice guy,” says Mr. Coleman. “And then when he starts doing this show, he disappears into the characters.”

One character, a mechanic named Jack from Harlan County, Ky., has such a strong accent that Mr. Hoyle displays supertitles on the stage behind him while performing. “When you stop workin’, that’s quittin’. Pretty much that means you’re fixin’ to die,” says Jack, a former coal miner in his 70s.

Mr. Hoyle’s attention to physical detail was influenced by his father. He is the son of Geoff Hoyle, a British actor known for playing Zazu in the original Broadway production of “The Lion King” and for being one of the principal clowns in the Pickle Family Circus, a small circus founded in San Francisco in the 1970s. (Geoff Hoyle is also performing at the Marsh this month, in a one-man show called “Geezer,” about growing old.)

With San Francisco as his base, Mr. Hoyle spent summers with his father in Toronto, Plum Island, Mass., and elsewhere. “Being around the circus when I was really young more than anything gave me a love of traveling,” he says. In college at Northwestern from 1998 to 2003, he was less interested in the traditional theater scene than in exploring Chicago, discovering what he calls the “theater of the streets.”

“I would just get in a train and get off at any stop and walk around and try to talk to strangers,” Mr. Hoyle says, from gigolos to people at Puerto Rican dancehalls. His first play, “Stuck Up,” in 2002, was about his encounters on a largely African-American basketball court, where the other players at first called him “Wayne Gretzky,” because he is white.

Mr. Hoyle traveled to Nigeria on a Fulbright scholarship in 2005 and 2006 to study the politics of oil, which served as the basis for his 2007 play “Tings Dey Happen,” which won the 2007 Will Glickman Award for Best New Play and later ran for five months off-Broadway in New York at The Culture Project.

For “The Real Americans,” Mr. Hoyle’s inspiration was a feeling of being insulated living in San Francisco’s Mission District, where friends and acquaintances would seem overly concerned about issues like whether their muffin was organic. So he set out to “write a valentine to small-town and rural America” and in doing so, “was shocked by the anger and resentment towards liberal America and its values,” he says.

Mr. Hoyle has “a refined analytical ability to understand events in the world and present them in theatrical terms that are really entertaining,” says Tony Taccone, the artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where Mr. Hoyle also performed.

For his next project, Mr. Hoyle is turning his eye to journalism, which he has been researching by “hanging out” with journalists and consumers of news. “The fracturing of media has created an environment in which it is more difficult to have common ground,” he says. Tentatively titled “The News,” the play will be finished at some point in 2013 after Mr. Hoyle travels to India to study its newspaper culture.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

Managing the same baseball team for 10 years is as rare as getting 3,000 hits. Since 1900, only 28 men have done either. So the three-year extension Joe Maddon signed this week to extend his tenure to a full decade with the Tampa Bay Rays (through 2015) puts him on a path to join select company.

Currently, just two active managers have lasted 10 or more years as their team’s skipper: the Twins’ Ron Gardenhire and the Angels’ Mike Scioscia. The recently retired Tony La Russa managed to last that long with two teams—the A’s and the Cardinals. Of the 141 men who have managed in the big leagues since 1990, only six others have hung on with the same team for 10-plus years.

Historically, there’s no touching Connie Mack, who managed the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 years. But it’s hardly fair to compare him to other managers, since Mack also owned the A’s for most of his tenure. Mack lost more games than he won (.486 lifetime), though he won five World Series.

Maddon, who is entering his seventh year with Tampa, has already won two manager-of-the-year awards. He’s done so while sharing a division with the Yankees and Red Sox. Despite finishing last his first two years, Maddon has already lifted his Rays record above .500 (.509)—perhaps his most impressive achievement.

—Michael Salfino

By JOHN ANDERSON

The best way to think about the Madonna-directed “W.E.” is not to think about it too much. A disjointed diptych inspired by the largely unlamented Duchess of Windsor, it contains little that’s original or insightful about the American adventuress Wallis Simpson, or her empire-rattling love for Edward VIII. The film’s parallel narrative, about a frustrated socialite in late 1990s Manhattan, contains very few parallels. The director’s apparent blindness to the epic banality of her subjects suggests that the whole project is one royally misguided mess.

Think about it too much, and it will only lead to trouble, because in examining the possible inspirations for “W.E.” (short for “Wallis and Edward”), one begins to detect a modicum of artistic intelligence. Like Wallis Simpson, Madonna, principal stuntwoman of late-20th-century pop iconography, has certainly come in for her share of vicious and perhaps warranted attacks, but that’s because deception has always been a principal part of her repertoire. Her artistry is that of the con: She’s never quite the character in her ever-changing act, be it pop star, sex symbol, movie actress, corseted concert attraction, or Vatican gadfly. Her gift is marketing. Throughout her various manifestations, she has manipulated celebrity, commerciality and perception with the same aplomb as Andy Warhol. But she can never admit to it, lest she burst the fragile bubble of her fame.

Likewise, Mrs. Simpson. Born in Pennsylvania, raised in Baltimore, the plain-faced Wallis was still married to her second husband when she met Edward, Prince of Wales, known to his intimates as David and heir to the throne soon to be vacated by his father, George V. Theirs was the “romance of the century,” a spin even “W.E.” can’t present with a straight face. “I will have to be with him always,” Wallis wails when the abdication is complete, knowing that once a man sacrifices a kingdom for a woman, the woman has no way out.

The Duke and Duchess, a la Madonna, are problematic, as they should be, Wallis much more so than David. She may have been utterly unsuitable to the royal family—a commoner, twice divorced, with a track record that would make Madonna blush (Madonna the pop persona, that is). But she was strong, where David was weak, and some say she may have saved England: David’s brother, the future King George VI, and his wife, Elizabeth, who were virtually deified in last year’s “The King’s Speech,” are treated here like morons, or worse, but it was they who gave their country strength in time of need. It was Wallis and David who had dinner with Hitler.

In her portrayal of Wallis, the young English actress Andrea Riseborough proves herself utterly brilliant, and utterly amorphous: Having seen her in “Happy-Go-Lucky,” “Made in Dagenham,” “Brighton Rock” and now “W.E.,” I had no idea I was watching the same actress, although each performance was better than the last. This is the time to see the gifted Ms. Riseborough, before those gifts are subsumed by stardom. Less startling, but burdened with a far less gratifying role, is Ms. Riseborough’s counterpart, Abbie Cornish. Her Wally Winthrop is a wealthy doctor’s wife living a life of quiet desperation on upper Fifth Avenue and obsessing over her namesake, Wallis Simpson (what her parents were thinking goes unconsidered). That the Wally half of the movie is set in 1998 allows people to smoke in public places, but also coincides with the record-breaking Sotheby’s auction of the couple’s estate, an event at which the so-called “abdication desk”—the one at which Edward sat while making his famous speech about “the woman I love”—brought in $415,000. The one genuinely joyous moment of the film occurs when Wally bids $10,000 for some Wallis gloves, and earns a round of applause from a roomful of moneyed Windsorphiles. It says a lot about the movie.

But what does it say about Madonna? And her intent? And does that intent matter? Can “W.E.” be a provocation by accident and still be worthwhile? It’s a question that has long nagged art critics: A painter who enjoys no success at all throughout his career suddenly happens upon a style or a moment in which his experiments and the zeitgeist coalesce, and he seems to be a genius. Then the moment passes.

It’s hard not to think of Madonna in the same terms, and her moment may have arrived with this movie. “W.E.” is a bore and, as a structure, should be condemned. At the same time, the techniques speak a brutal honesty about both Wallis and her biographer: The visual fascination is with ornamentation, dress and the detritus of appetites. All we see are surfaces. The pieces of the story don’t add up, but neither did the “romance of the century.” It’s hard to guess how much leeway Ms. Riseborough was given vis-à-vis Wallis, but the actress makes the duchess a thoroughly dislikable character, one who harbors fathomless ambition instead of heart, ruthlessness instead of sex appeal, but with whom we feel we are expected to sympathize. Through unconvincing tears, Wallis wails, “What have I done to deserve this treatment?” when the rest of the royals have shunned her, and she realizes she and Edward are destined to be cast as “the world’s most celebrated parasites.”

Among other things, one wants to say to her, you allowed a constitutional crisis to occur in your husband’s country on the eve of war, when civilization itself was hanging in the balance.

‘The Woman in Black’

Despite the presence of former Harry Potter impersonator Daniel Radcliffe, it seems unlikely that director James Watkins’s version of “The Woman in Black”—based on the 1983 Susan Hill novel, itself the basis for one of the biggest successes ever on the London stage—will do much for the franchise. Mr. Radcliffe, an eminently likable personality, wanders apprehensively around the dread Eel Marsh House, haunted by the beshrouded ghost of the title, looking like he’s missed the train to Hogwarts. The landscape is dire, the architecture is haunted, children disappear by the dozens and antique toys inexplicably spark to life. That Mr. Radcliffe doesn’t is part of the problem.

Another problem is Mr. Watkins’ shameless use of jump-scare tactics, which include cadaverous faces looming out of mirrors, windows, keyholes and anything else into which a character might peer, poke or peak. Even when you know, after a few jolts, what Mr. Watkins’ strategy is, it’s impossible not to recoil when another face appears; the human body’s alarm system is a curious thing. After a while, you wonder why an audience wouldn’t just strap itself to a Milgram machine and let others give them electrical shocks.

Ciarán Hinds and Janet McTeer, a pair of formidable supporting players, are among the cast and Mr. Watkins shows a sense of style with his haunted house, which is regularly cut off from the world by the tides and where the things of childhood assume a demonic aura. But a movie can only cry “Boo!” so many times before the victim runs out of patience.

‘Windfall’

Speaking of horror movies, the monsters are 400 feet tall in “Windfall,” easily the more haunting film of this week and a sublimely cinematic documentary by the film editor-cum-director Laura Israel. Her subject is the battle waged over wind power in the tiny upstate New York town of Meredith. What’s so scary? Industrial wind turbines, the fetish objects of the green-minded, those sleek, white, propellered and purportedly eco-friendly energy collectors that one might have seen dotting the desert outside Palm Springs, and which may soon be sprouting out of Nantucket Sound. They’re sustainable, they produce no emissions and they’ll reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil. Right? Not quite. And living next to one seems like a nightmare.

Ms. Israel’s movie proves, once again, that the best nonfiction cinema possesses the same attributes as good fiction: Strong characters, conflict, story arc, visual style. The people of Meredith, be they pro or con the wind-turbine plan being fast-tracked by their town council, are articulate, passionate, likable. The issues are argued with appropriate gravity, and even though Ms. Israel, a Meredith homeowner herself, is clearly antiturbine, the other side gets a chance to speak its piece: Farmers, an endangered species, need income. Turbine leases are a way to it. But not only do the energy and ecological benefits fall short of what they’re cracked up to be, the turbines themselves are an environmental disaster: The monotonous whoosh of the propellers, the constant strobing effect caused by the 180-foot-long propellers, the threat of ice being hurled by the blades, the knowledge that it’s never going to end, all adds up to a recipe for madness. And that’s just during the movie.

“Windfall” is thoroughly engaging, educational and entertaining; the neo-blues music by Hazmat Modine is a real plus. Ms. Israel might deny it out of respect for her collaborators past and future, but documentaries are all about the editing. Many filmmakers might have been able to assemble the parts of “Windfall.” Far fewer would have produced as stylish a result.

—Mr. Anderson contributes film criticism and coverage to a variety of publications. Joe Morgenstern is on vacation.

DVD Focus

‘The Woman in Green’ (1945)

The 11th in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce series of Sherlock Holmes adventures and the ninth set in 1940s London (rather than the Victorian era of the original Conan Doyle stories), it’s also the third film in which Professor Moriarty (Henry Daniell) dies. Be that as it may, the Rathbone-Bruce films are like comfort food, the interplay having the easy give of an old couch, and the mysteries providing a showcase for Holmes’s reassuring deductive genius. In this one, he’s faced with a case of murdered young women, all of whom have been found with their forefingers severed.

‘The Woman in Red’ (1984)

A comedy of absurdity cut on a certain sex-crazed 1980s template in which Gene Wilder directed himself, his wife Gilda Radner, the singular Charles Grodin and the former Ford model Kelly LeBrock (renowned for her “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” ads and for marrying Steven Seagal), who was making her movie debut. Mr. Wilder’s seemingly contented character becomes obsessed with Ms. LeBrock’s Charlotte after seeing her red dress sent aloft by a gust from a street grate (a heist from Billy Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch”) and thereafter manages to alienate everyone in his quest of the unattainable.

‘The Woman in the Window’ (1944)

Film noir from the great Fritz Lang, this is another tale of romantic obsession, starring Edward G. Robinson as a professor infatuated by femme fatale Joan Bennett. Based a J.H. Wallis novel, it echoes another more famous film of 1944, “Laura,” in that Mr. Robinson’s character falls for the woman’s portrait before meeting the woman herself. With a screenplay by Nunnally Johnson (“The Grapes of Wrath”), “Woman in the Window” took quite a few liberties with the original story, including the excision of a suicide, in order to conform to Hollywood’s Production Code.

—John Anderson