TAKE TWO: A Life in Movies and Politics

by Philip Dunne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 1980

Take both. Screenwriter and director Philip Dunne--by good fortune (as he'd be the first to say) the son of Finley Peter Dunne, creator of ""Mr. Dooley""--has written a charmer about Hollywood's palmy days and a dead-level account of the blacklist. Polished at St. Bernard's, Middlesex, and Harvard, Dunne turned up in Hollywood in 1930 and decided on day one ""that a career in the movies could only be rich and rewarding"": he saw a director in flagrant command, he saw a crowing writer get a pink slip. And, with a few screen credits to his name (one of them for Count of Monte Cristo), he won a long-term contract from Darryl Zanuck--the start of 25 buoyant years at 20th Century-Fox. Because Dunne was social, sporty, political, his father's son, and apparently tireless, the pages are peppered with Names, quips, anecdotes. Because his auctorial pride is piqued by the ""Auteur Theory,"" there's considerable on the script as the sine qua non of a film--and the direction as an immeasurable quantity (instanced by How Green Was My Valley--for which John Ford won an Oscar, and Dunne didn't). And because he shamelessly reveres Zanuck--who ""had a way of despising those who most cravenly yessed him,"" who okayed (or vetoed) ideas on the instant, who didn't cut comers or let down subordinates--he tells one after another great Zanuck story. Still, the book's most memorable line is ""none of it need have happened if enough of us had stood up and fought back""--said, of course, about the blacklist. Dunne had been active in organizing the Screen Writers Guild; he had left the Motion Picture Democratic Committee when ""the good wheel-horse Communists"" swung it around to the Moscow line; he had cleared himself with Martin Dies--and failed to win wartime clearance from the Navy. In 1947, when ""the Un-Americans struck,"" he knew the risk of supporting the unfriendly witnesses and he had no illusions about them: now, he's out to rebut both right-wing allegations that he and his fellow-upholders-of-the-First-Amendment were dupes and ""the current revisionist mythology"" that would heroicize the Hollywood Ten (who, Dunne thinks, should have taken the First). His only regret is that he didn't leave Fox the day Ring Lardner, Jr., was fired. Post-blacklist, the book is mostly movies: biblical epics, defensible and otherwise; making The Way of a Gaucho in a way to please Peron; bowing as a director with Prince of Players; witnessing the triumph of ""television and timidity"" at dear old Fox. A few too many Names and old schoolmates--but on the whole a book that sparkles at its most sober.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION