Not the definitive biography that historians and fans may have hoped for, but an entertaining read as well as a bittersweet...
Once again, Chandler (I, Fellini, 1995, etc.) lets an acclaimed and beloved filmmaker tell his life story largely in his own words.
When he died earlier this year at the age of 95, Billy Wilder’s artistic legacy included such classics as Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment, all of which he directed and co-wrote. Born to German-speaking Jewish parents in an area of Austria-Hungary that's now part of Poland, Wilder worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin before becoming a screenwriter. His career in the German film industry was cut short when Hitler came to power, and he eventually wound up in the US. Although he spoke little English on his arrival, he became one of the great screenwriters of Hollywood's golden age. His films, usually written in collaboration, first with Charles Brackett, then later with I.A.L. Diamond, are noted for their sophisticated, sometimes cynical, humor and an ear for the found poetry of the American vernacular unmatched by any other filmmaker with the possible exception of Preston Sturges. Wilder was also a world-class raconteur, which proves both a strength and a weakness here. (The title, from the memorable last line of Some Like It Hot, also neatly sums up Wilder's wryly mordant worldview.) His anecdotes are fascinating and often hilarious, but many of them may already be familiar to readers of earlier accounts, most notably Cameron Crowe's Conversations with Wilder (1999). In addition, Chandler makes only the most cursory attempt to put Wilder's work into any sort of critical context, all too often simply letting him do the talking, along with various friends and collaborators, and limiting herself to potted synopses of his films and the occasional piece of necessary exposition.
Not the definitive biography that historians and fans may have hoped for, but an entertaining read as well as a bittersweet memorial to one of cinema's true originals.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1709-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
