As infectious as Mancini’s score, and sure to please lovers of classic American cinema.
Behind the scenes of the cinema’s gold standard for sparkling romantic comedy.
In this slim, fast-paced volume, Wasson (A Splurch in the Kisser: The Films of Blake Edwards, 2009) presents an irresistibly gossipy account of the production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), charting the transformation of actress Audrey Hepburn into an icon of emerging sexual liberation—the good/bad girl, the lovable “kook,” independent and sexually experienced but sufficiently charming to bring home to mother. Rich in incident and set among the glitterati of America’s most glamorous era, the book reads like a novel. Hepburn’s “discovery” by the regal French author Colette, searching for an actress to incarnate her character Gigi on the stage, has the fairy-tale resonance of the actress’ star-making turns in Roman Holiday (1953) and Sabrina (1954). Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a tricky proposition for a film adaptation. The novel’s sexually progressive elements were severely at odds with Hollywood’s notions of acceptable content. Truman Capote lobbied for pal Marilyn Monroe to play the part of party girl Holly Golightly—and, startlingly, expressed wishes to play the male lead himself—but Monroe’s image was too sexual for such delicate material, and the part went instead to the girlish Hepburn, a doe-eyed ingénue convinced she could not do justice to the part. Other players in the Wasson’s narrative include writer George Axelrod, frustrated by the neutering of his previous screenplays and eager to get a sophisticated, adult sex comedy on screen; up-and-coming director Blake Edwards, witty and enthusiastic but nobody’s first choice for the job; male lead George Peppard, disliked and mocked by the rest of the company for his method-acting pretensions and general arrogance; and composer Henry Mancini, whose jazzy score ushered in a sea change for movie music and whose classic song “Moon River” was nearly cut at the 11th hour by a producer who preferred more traditional Broadway fare. Wasson marshals this rich material in a page-turning delight. Even if his assertions of the movie’s sociological significance don’t fully convince, he has assembled a sparkling time capsule of old Hollywood magic and mythmaking.
As infectious as Mancini’s score, and sure to please lovers of classic American cinema.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-177415-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Neal Porter/Flash Point/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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