Huge, richly researched, absorbing revisionist biography of the filmmaker renowned for standing up for ``the little man''; by the author of studies of Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and others. In 1981, McBride was asked to help prepare an homage to Capra (1897-1991) for the National Film Institute's Life Achievement award. In researching Capra, McBride discovered that the director's well-received autobiography, The Name Above the Title (1971), was a self-aggrandizing fairy tale. Although such 30's and 40's films as It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's A Wonderful Life seemingly displayed Capra as a giant talent supporting the cause of ``the little man,'' Capra was actually an insecure, anti-New Deal reactionary who always voted for the money and, as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for several years running, always stood up for the studios rather than the newly formed talent guilds and unions. In his autobiography, McBride says, Capra reinvented his career and papered over the help he had from his excellent cameraman, Joseph Walker, who gave sculptural depth and richness to all his major films, and from writers Jo Swerling, Sidney Buchman, and Robert Riskin, who wrote all ``the little man's'' speeches, devised Capra's stories, and gave edge and shape to his characters. Capra apparently also misrepresented his ties with Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn, who had (and exercised) right of final cut on all Capra pictures—although Capra trumpeted himself as a ``one man, one picture'' auteur. McBride thinks that Capra's need to appropriate credit belonging to others stemmed from insecurity about the nature of his own abilities and from a fear of success common to first-generation professionals, who often think themselves imposters. Looking at some of his pictures late in life, Capra mused, ``...they don't seem to be mine. It's difficult for me to understand.'' Superb in every way. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-73494-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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