A magisterial, crazily comprehensive biographical study of the original renegade director: the man they loved to hate, Erich von Stroheim. Lennig (Film, Emeritus/SUNY Albany; The Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi, not reviewed) spent 20 years researching his subject; the result is an exhaustive tapestry that transcends its critical-theoretical leanings to transport the reader back to Hollywood’s heady (and, for Stroheim, cruelly capricious) days. Discounting his hero’s lies and evasions about his past, Lennig pieces together the fragments of Stroheim’s humiliation-filled youth in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite his claims of military service, Stroheim had been declared unfit to serve, a blow whose many effects on his films and his persona Lennig traces. Stroheim was socially alienated but also smart and ambitious enough to immigrate to America and climb the Hollywood ladder from extra to assistant director and scenarist, playing a number of —vile Huns— before directing his first picture, Blind Husbands, in 1919. He soon became notorious for both his prickly persona and an obsession with —realistic— filmmaking, which caused successive productions to devour funds and film stock. His artistic individualism could be bafflingly self-destructive, as in his bait-and-switch at Goldwyn, where the studio contracted for a lighthearted film and received the eight-hour-long Greed. Such tales flesh out a meticulous portrait of the often reckless silent-film era (the studio destroyed three fourths of Greed). Lennig offers exhaustive interpretive summaries of all Stroheim’s films before turning to his later descent. Swindled and blacklisted by ham-handed producers, he fell into near-penury in the 1930s, eventually escaping from Poverty Row films to become a respected (yet understandably embittered) actor in postwar France. Although Lennig underplays Stroheim’s legendary dark personal pursuits, he provides a definitive portrait of the notorious director and, in his accounting of the follies of art met by commerce, an affecting cultural history. (30 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8131-2138-8
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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