If you skip the preaching to the choir and the film-school analysis, Louvish’s wide-eyed love for his subjects’ simple,...
A fan’s gleeful, if excessive, double-take on the beloved bumblers of silent and talking picture fame, seeing their prodigious pile of slapstick misadventures as high art.
Novelist and London International Film School teacher Louvish continues his biographical exploration of the kings of American film comedy (Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, 1997, etc.) with a sprightly, sympathetic dual biography of the rotund, fastidious Georgia-born Oliver Norvell Hardy and his thin, feckless British sidekick, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who legally adopted his vaudeville stage name of Stanley Laurel in 1931 after the duo’s two-reelers made for Hal Roach’s Culver City studio gathered world-wide fame. Louvish sees the pair’s comedy as bright flotsam in a historical gush starting with ancient Greece and coming up to Chaplin mentor Fred Karno (Laurel understudied for Chaplin) and to Laurel’s father, English theater owner and sketch writer Arthur Jefferson. Eager fan clubs that have named themselves after the duo’s spoof of the Sons of Desert masonic, have generated a stack of scholarly volumes that Louvish eagerly credits while offering some deathless revelations: Hardy offended his mother by marrying a Jew; Laurel’s comic inventiveness was rooted in older music-hall and vaudeville routines; the off-screen Hardy wasn’t quite the passive foil of Laurel’s fussy genius; and the outsize harridans wielding rolling-pins in the films were based on the pair’s exploitative studio bosses and on a string of mostly unhappy marriages (Hardy had three wives, Laurel five). Louvish lets his spotlight wander, as he did with Margaret Dumont in his Marx Brothers biography, Monkey Business (2000), by detailing the mostly unfulfilled lives of supporting actors, such as the bald and manically antagonistic Jimmy Finlayson.
If you skip the preaching to the choir and the film-school analysis, Louvish’s wide-eyed love for his subjects’ simple, forthright, and hardworking desire to please will bring down the house. (Filmography and 52 b&w photos)Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26651-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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