The many indifferent, sophomoric essays here will give Tracy fans information about his early work; the best ones will give...
The obscure, often deservedly so, early films in which Spencer Tracy forged his screen persona are dusted off in this uneven collection of essays from the New England Vintage Film Society.
Before he developed into a film icon of rough-hewn moral integrity, Tracy was a contract player churning out forgettable entertainments for Fox Films in the early 1930s. The dozen flicks analyzed here provided him a broad palette of characters—jailbirds with hearts of gold, ruthless gangsters, macho lady-killers, sappy romantics, working-class mugs and amoral tycoons—but they also saddled him with contrived plots, clumsy scripts and dimwitted sidekicks trotted out to generate yucks. It’s forgivable that the film scholars and buffs assembled here don’t always take a liking to these films, less so that they don’t always take an interest in them. Short, shallow, badly edited—“The only character to which Tracy maintains any sort of affection is for his fellow sailor” [sic]—and often lacking in reader-friendly amenities such as plot summaries, many of the essays have the perfunctory feel of college term papers. Tracy’s naturalistic acting is praised to the skies, but readers get little feel for it because commentators rarely delve into his technique. Instead, they harp on the most obvious aspects of the films—racial and gender stereotypes, Depression-era cultural references, the mildly risqué gestures and badinage of pre-Production Code Hollywood. There are bright spots in the anthology, such as Eric Shoag’s sprightly appreciation of Tracy and Joan Bennett’s romance in Me and My Gal and Jeremy Bond’s interpretation of The Face in the Sky as “a reverse Wizard of Oz” in which “no place is as bad as home.” Charles Morrow’s fine study of Tracy as a comedic actor is a high point—a sharply written, aesthetically engaged retrospective that blends shrewd criticism with a vivid evocation of the actor’s onscreen presence.
The many indifferent, sophomoric essays here will give Tracy fans information about his early work; the best ones will give them reasons to see it.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1436341387
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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