Still, these crystalline snapshots of a long-gone Hollywood should please most cinéastes.
A well-constructed anthology that provides satisfying meditations on film scandals both notorious and obscure.
McLean (Film Studies/Univ. of Texas) and Cook (A History of Narrative Film, not reviewed) assemble a cast of contributors who examine the “enormously potent and diverse historical, cultural, and ideological meanings” of such star scandals as Fatty Arbuckle’s manslaughter trial and Wallace Reid’s narcotics addiction. Sam Stoloff takes a novel approach to understanding Arbuckle (arguably the first mediated cinema scandal) by juxtaposing his moralized, melodramatic fall from grace with the concurrent Chicago White Sox scandal, noting how each resulted in self-imposed autocratic controls upon the respective industries. Mark Anderson sensitively traces how overworked early star Reid succumbed to the nascent film colony’s accessible drug scene, and how his demise was shamelessly exploited in campaigns to criminalize addiction. Nancy Cook resurrects a fascinating obscurity from Hollywood’s long-tortured relationship with race: the tale of Long Lance, a celebrated Ojibwa Indian who in 1928 starred in an “all-Indian” melodrama The Silent Enemy and was subsequently ruined by accusations (from other cast members) that he was, in fact, Negro. An important chapter by Cynthia Baron concerns the 1948 Red-baiting of the Actors’ Laboratory (a prominent theater company and school); its members were all blacklisted in a pungent prelude to McCarthyism. Other significant discussions concern the role of 1950s magazines like Confidential in “systematizing” scandal, and the travails encountered by pioneers of sexual independence (such as Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, and Jane Fonda). These are lively and culturally novel explorations; unfortunately, most of the writers fall back at points upon abstruse and alienating academic prose.
Still, these crystalline snapshots of a long-gone Hollywood should please most cinéastes.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8135-2885-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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