An entertaining picture of a complicated cinema icon, albeit viewed through rose-colored glasses.
A new biography attempts to understand the many sides of one of the 20th century’s most famous actors.
Charlton Heston (1923-2008) was a man of contradictions. The 1960s activist who fought to convince studios to make more films in the United States is the same actor whose most profitable pictures, including The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and El Cid, were shot overseas. Eliot (American Titan: Searching for John Wayne, 2014, etc.), biographer of such Hollywood conservatives as Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and Cary Grant, shows how Heston, a one-time Democrat who marched in the earliest civil rights protests and fought to preserve public funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, became a Nixon supporter who detested the “Woodstock-flavored counterculture that wanted to blame the soldiers” for the Vietnam War and, most notoriously, became the president of the National Rifle Association. Eliot writes insightfully about Heston’s acting. “Heston’s interpretations rarely went beneath the surface” of his characters, a style that nonetheless worked well in costume dramas such as The Greatest Show on Earth and later sci-fi films such as Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green. The prose is workmanlike throughout, however, and the book is hagiographic: Eliot criticizes the lesser films—Julius Caesar, The Hawaiians, The Call of the Wild—but not Heston, except to acknowledge that he “remained weakest in the romance department in his films” and that his late-life politics cost him acting jobs. Still, readers will enjoy the many inside-Hollywood anecdotes, such as Heston chatting with the Ten Commandments crew about “what he imagined Moses’s sex life might have been like” and the director, Cecil B. DeMille, finding the editing of the film “a surgical chore” when he discovered that some of the extras in the orgy scene were “behaving a little too much like true Method actors, blurring the line between acting and real life.”
An entertaining picture of a complicated cinema icon, albeit viewed through rose-colored glasses.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242043-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
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
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