A diffuse, blurry portrait of an American icon.
A biography as sprawling as one of the director’s epics.
Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959) often asked the multitudes of actors gathered on the set of one of his biblical tales to pause for a moment of prayer. Later, on some nights, DeMille invited members of the company back to his estate for a bacchanal to which some, rumors have it, brought their own whips. This was DeMille in life and on film: angelic choruses and hoochy-coochy girls. Film historian Louvish (Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin, 2006, etc.) reaches one obvious conclusion: DeMille was “a hypocrite.” But rather than dig through DeMille’s laundry, Louvish concentrates on the 70 films the director lensed in nearly 50 years. The author devotes more than half of the book to DeMille’s silent films, many of which, he contends, are overlooked gems. Overshadowing these early, gentle works—light comedies and domestic dramas—are the thumping spectacles from DeMille’s sound period: The Greatest Show on Earth, Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments. Louvish packs in detail the way the director packed extras into the scene of the Israelites departing for the Promised Land in The Ten Commandments. A half page, for example, is devoted to W.W. Hodkinson, who revolutionized the way movies were produced and distributed. Despite the detail, Louvish comes up with muddled, equivocal answers to many fundamental questions: Who and what defined the DeMille style, if indeed one existed? Was DeMille an artist or, as many argue, a shameless huckster? Why did his spectacle films, however leaden, clean up at the box office? Were audiences enraptured with the often fundamentalist religious zeal the films bespoke? What in DeMille’s life presaged his lifelong anti-communist, anti-union fervor?
A diffuse, blurry portrait of an American icon.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37733-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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