FRAME-BY-FRAME FOCUS ON SPIELBERG'S CELLULOID CAREER.

Byline: Douglas Newlove Hollywood Reporter

Title: "The Films of Steven Spielberg"

Author: Douglas Brode

Data: 255 pages, Citadel Press; $18.95

Our rating: Four Stars

Douglas Brode's "The Films of Steven Spielberg" marks a continuation of his works on esteemed figures in Hollywood.

A playwright and screenwriter, Brode has written several studies and "Films of ..." books for Citadel Press, including those on Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro and two on Woody Allen. At Syracuse University, he teaches a course on film directors as well as a course on the films of Steven Spielberg, the first such course to be taught at any major university in the United States. This book is serious, well-researched and clearly thought out, as Spielberg deserves.

No mere fact-gatherer, Brode treats each film essayistically, often going through the better films sequence by sequence, pointing out Spielberg's continuing themes, his strengths and lapses, and avoids Citadel's usual patchwork of critical quotations at the end of each chapter. He has so much to say that he hasn't much space for Spielberg's critics, though they receive their due. He is especially keen on tracking Spielberg's location shoots and showing how each film was assembled, which sequences shot in what order, and those in which inspiration faltered.

Among Spielberg's failures, the standout financially is "1941," a wildly unfunny, high-velocity screech, more or less modeled on Wiley E. Coyote's cartoon capers. Spielberg says, "I'll spend the rest of my life disowning this movie." His Disneyfication of Alice Walker's bleak "The Color Purple" is taken to task harshly by Brode. The author also comes down solidly for Spielberg as director of the strongly Spielbergian "Poltergeist," rather than nominal director Tobe Hooper.

Spielberg's themes often center around separation from a mother and abandonment by a father, although in his 40s he began focusing on father figures such as professor Henry Jones, father of Indiana, and Oskar Schindler. Of "E.T.," Spielberg said, "I wanted a creature that only a mother could love."

One studio executive, after hearing Spielberg describe "Schindler's List," Brode writes, "suggested (without irony) that the filmmaker ought to merely take the money it would cost to film 'Schindler's List' and contribute that amount to the Holocaust museum rather than wasting it on a film no one would ever pay to see. Spielberg took the statement as a gauntlet across the face."

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Photo "I wanted a creature that only a mother could love." says Steven Spielberg