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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
