Scattershot, intermittently engaging profiles of Old Hollywood icons.
This biographical anthology from the New England Vintage Film Society celebrates the lowly thespians whose theater training turned them into Hollywood royalty in the dawning era of sound films.
While silent movies were a quintessentially visual entertainment whose performers needed striking looks and expressive pantomime, the new-fangled talkies that arrived in the late 1920s required actors who could, well, talk—and talk well. That meant ransacking the nation’s stages and vaudeville houses for actors with the resonant voices and verbal agility to bring to life film’s new aural dimension. This uneven collection of essays—highlighting big stars as well as a raft of character actors, and decorated with dozens of striking photos—charts that migration with varying degrees of sophistication. Some of the pieces are shallow, and weakly written, rehashes of a star’s early theater appearances; they treat the stage career mainly as a training ground where actors learned their craft and incubated their future movie personas. Others explore the mutual adaptation between stage and screen styles more seriously; Cinzi Lavin’s illuminating piece on Mae West, for example, shows how the pioneering vamp jumped from stage to screen by toning down her presence, keeping her razor-sharp timing and camouflaging her bawdy repartee with double-entendres that deftly evaded studio censors. The articles on luminaries such as Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Spencer Tracy are too skimpy to add much to our understanding of these already well-mapped stars. The book’s more useful contribution is in its many profiles of character actors such as Charley Grapewin and Eddie Quillan, old vaudevillians with long-honed skills at building indelible stock characters. Jon Steinhagen’s sprightly profiles of two seldom-sung Tinseltown mainstays—Warren William, the ultimate suave lothario, and Lee Tracy, eternal embodiment of working-class operators with brains and moxie—stand out as the kind of rapt, perceptive close-ups that make for vibrant film criticism.
Scattershot, intermittently engaging profiles of Old Hollywood icons.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453587744
Page Count: 570
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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