The many indifferent, sophomoric essays here will give Tracy fans information about his early work; the best ones will give...
The obscure, often deservedly so, early films in which Spencer Tracy forged his screen persona are dusted off in this uneven collection of essays from the New England Vintage Film Society.
Before he developed into a film icon of rough-hewn moral integrity, Tracy was a contract player churning out forgettable entertainments for Fox Films in the early 1930s. The dozen flicks analyzed here provided him a broad palette of characters—jailbirds with hearts of gold, ruthless gangsters, macho lady-killers, sappy romantics, working-class mugs and amoral tycoons—but they also saddled him with contrived plots, clumsy scripts and dimwitted sidekicks trotted out to generate yucks. It’s forgivable that the film scholars and buffs assembled here don’t always take a liking to these films, less so that they don’t always take an interest in them. Short, shallow, badly edited—“The only character to which Tracy maintains any sort of affection is for his fellow sailor” [sic]—and often lacking in reader-friendly amenities such as plot summaries, many of the essays have the perfunctory feel of college term papers. Tracy’s naturalistic acting is praised to the skies, but readers get little feel for it because commentators rarely delve into his technique. Instead, they harp on the most obvious aspects of the films—racial and gender stereotypes, Depression-era cultural references, the mildly risqué gestures and badinage of pre-Production Code Hollywood. There are bright spots in the anthology, such as Eric Shoag’s sprightly appreciation of Tracy and Joan Bennett’s romance in Me and My Gal and Jeremy Bond’s interpretation of The Face in the Sky as “a reverse Wizard of Oz” in which “no place is as bad as home.” Charles Morrow’s fine study of Tracy as a comedic actor is a high point—a sharply written, aesthetically engaged retrospective that blends shrewd criticism with a vivid evocation of the actor’s onscreen presence.
The many indifferent, sophomoric essays here will give Tracy fans information about his early work; the best ones will give them reasons to see it.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1436341387
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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