David Lehman

David Lehman, a contributing editor of the Scholar, is a poet, a critic, and an editor. Ithaca, his new book of poems, won The New Criterion Poetry Prize for 2025. He runs the “Next Line, Please” poetry feature on our website.

The First Lady of Noir

Celebrated actress Ida Lupino directed The Bigamist and other taboo-busting films

By David Lehman | Saturday May 22, 2021

Blind Accidents

How John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle brilliantly epitomizes the caper film

By David Lehman | Saturday April 17, 2021

Blonde Venus

The mystique of Marlene Dietrich

By David Lehman | Saturday March 6, 2021

A Reluctant Spy’s Conversion

Revisiting George Seaton’s underrated 1962 film, The Counterfeit Traitor

By David Lehman | Thursday February 4, 2021

Hamlet vs. the Nazis

A look back at Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 movie, To Be or Not To Be

By David Lehman | Monday January 4, 2021

Rogues’ Gallery

Cinema’s greatest villains

By David Lehman | Saturday November 28, 2020

Gangsters in Love

Revisiting Sergio Leone’s 1984 classic, Once Upon a Time in America

By David Lehman | Saturday October 17, 2020

Coward, Take My Coward’s Hand

Looking back at Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave

By David Lehman | Thursday August 13, 2020

An Exchange of Bullets in Belfast

Revisiting Carol Reed’s 1947 masterpiece Odd Man Out

By David Lehman | Thursday July 9, 2020

Strangers and Mirrors

Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

By David Lehman | Tuesday May 26, 2020

“In Regard to Your Submission”

By David Lehman | Monday August 31, 2026

Twentieth-Century Quiz Show

By David Lehman | Thursday May 21, 2026

A Photographer in Words

By David Lehman | Tuesday March 17, 2026

Why Lee Wiley? 

By David Lehman | Monday March 2, 2026

Resolutions or Regrets

By David Lehman | Monday February 9, 2026

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