An adroit and revealing biography of the talented director of such classics as Metropolis and M. Few directors weathered the transition from silent movies to sound as successfully as Lang. His success in doing so may have been, in part, due to the fact that his aesthetic remained essentially visual, a masterful and calculated use of angles, framing, and lighting. Beyond their usefulness in creating tableaux vivants, actors were, he seemed to feel, more of an annoyance than anything else. Not surprisingly, the notoriously perfectionist Lang mistreated some very high-priced talent, including Peter Lorre, Spencer Tracy, and Marlene Dietrich, as well as a raft of hapless producers. As Henry Fonda once remarked: `` `It just doesn't occur to him that actors are human beings. . . . He is the master puppeteer, and he is happiest only when he can manipulate the blank puppets.' '' Only perhaps in M, the tale of a wretched child-killer, did Lang achieve a full and rich psychological portrait. With his ever-present monocle and soldierly bearing, Lang seemed the epitome of the autocratic Prussian, but in truth he was not only Viennese but half-Jewish and a committed leftist. Soon after Hitler came to power, Lang—then considered Germany's greatest director—went into self-imposed exile in Hollywood. He was a dedicated mythomaniac, and veteran film biographer McGilligan (Jack's Life, 1994, etc.) does an extraordinarily thorough job of separating Lang fact from Lang fable. Despite the constant battles on the set and budget overruns, Lang worked well into his 70s. His retirement years, however, were pure Sunset Boulevard, as the nearly blind Lang kept detailed diaries of the minutiae of his day, conversed with his wooden pet monkey, Peter, and had longtime live-in ex-lover Lilly Latte regularly procure him prostitutes. McGilligan is not a graceful stylist, but he has a great story to tell, and he tells it with verve, originality, and insight. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 25, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-13247-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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
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
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