A thorough, insightful study not only of Fields’ film comedies, but of the inner turmoil that fueled his genius.
The final volume of a biographical trilogy captures W.C. Fields’ ascent to Hollywood immortality.
If his movie career had ended with his appearances in silent films between 1925 and 1928, W.C. Fields might only have been remembered as a second-tier talent. “I am at a stage where I cannot get an offer at all,” he wrote his wife after his first, not-too-memorable stint as a film actor. “I have been badly handled and am now out of the movies.” But after returning to Hollywood in 1931, Fields successfully made the transition to sound pictures, leaving an indelible mark on film comedy history with such classics as “It’s a Gift,” “The Bank Dick,” and “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.” Wertheim (W.C. Fields From the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway Stage to the Screen, 2016, etc.) colorfully and comprehensively captures Fields’ journey from “sacrificial lamb thrust aside” by Hollywood to “American cultural icon” in this final volume of a biographical trilogy. Fields was a “virtuoso comedian…who brought so much laughter to millions while enduring so much anguish,” he writes. The book makes effective use of a newly available archive of Fields’ papers to add texture to its portrait of a man whose life has already been the subject of numerous studies. “I stunk so badly the police came in [the theater] with the impression that someone had been throwing stink bombs around,” Fields wrote of one of his performances. Wertheim focuses mainly on the work, not only showing how Fields used his vaudeville background and vocal gifts to fashion his unique comic routines and persona, but also how iconoclastic many of his films were. “Instead of idealizing the sacrosanct family dining table as a place of tranquility, Fields lampoons it as a place of domestic turmoil,” he observes of “The Bank Dick.” But as the author also vividly shows, Fields’ comic genius cannot be separated from his inner turmoil, which manifested itself in his legendary drinking, his failed relationships with women, and a cantankerous disposition that prompted one director to call him “the most obstinate, ornery son of a bitch I ever tried to work with.” As with so many artists, fame could only go so far to fill the “voids in his life.”
A thorough, insightful study not only of Fields’ film comedies, but of the inner turmoil that fueled his genius.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-137-47329-5
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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