Funny, ever entertaining, immensely readable and revealing autobiography of action/suspense director Don Siegel and how he made or contributed to some 50 or more movies and TV shows. For buffs spellbound by the inner organs of moviemaking, Siegel (b. 1912) chooses a terrific way to tell his saga: by improvised screenplay dialogue. Siegel co-wrote most of his scripts and has a faultless ear for the voices of his fellow directors, co- writers, famous cameramen, producers, and giants like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, and Elvis; actors like Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Edward O'Brien, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, and Viveca Lindfors (Siegel's ex-wife); and studio execs like Hal Wallis and ogre Jack Warner. Siegel opens smashingly, with the taming of obscenity-spouting John Wayne for his farewell role as the cancer-ridden gunfighter of The Shootist (1976). Highlights include the making of prison pictures Riot in Cell Block 11 and Escape from Alcatraz; the horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers; detective flicks Dirty Harry, Madigan, and Coogan's Bluff; westerns Flaming Star and Two Mules for Sister Sara; crime epics Baby Face Nelson and Crime in the Streets; and oddities such as Clint Eastwood's The Beguiled. Siegel joined Warner Brothers in 1934 and worked his way through all the lesser departments of filmmaking until being put in charge of a second unit that created montages and inserts that glued stories together. For years, his fast-made but inventive montages accounted for more film per year than the footage of each of the studio's first-level directors. Siegel complains about studio heads, draws blood on folks who sold him out, and details the idiocy of trying to make a film (Rough Cut) produced by egomaniac Broadway producer David Merrick. So Dirty Harry isn't Hamlet! One of the top-drawer screen books, from which you rise gorged from an eye-popping Thanksgiving dinner of filmcraft. (Sixty b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-571-16270-3
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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
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