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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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