The definitive account of one of Hollywood's most notorious scandals.
What really happened between Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe in that San Francisco hotel room on September 5, 1921?
A few days after their encounter, Rappe, a movie bit player, died, and enormously successful film comedian Arbuckle was arrested for murder. Later charged with manslaughter, he survived two hung juries (one favored acquittal, the other conviction) before a third acquitted him. Merritt (Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film, 2000, etc.) displays great compassion for all involved, especially the two principals, both of whom have suffered at the hands of both formal and informal biographers. (Among other things, he traces, and dismisses, the egregious, pervasive story about rape-by-bottle.) Merritt begins with the Labor Day weekend when Arbuckle drove his lavish Pierce-Arrow to San Francisco for a hotel party. Although Prohibition was the law of the land, liquor flowed freely; Arbuckle had a huge stash back in his mansion. The author intercuts the stories of the weekend with the biographies of Arbuckle and Rappe, alternating chapters until he arrives at the trials. He provides necessary cinema history, including the history of film censorship, and ends with his own evaluation of the evidence and his conclusions about what probably occurred—though only Arbuckle and Rappe were present, so certainty is elusive. Merritt charts the sad arc of Arbuckle's career after his acquittal, emphasizing the loyalty of friends like Buster Keaton, and discusses his subsequent work behind the camera and on the vaudeville stage, where audiences often received him warmly. The author notes that the Arbuckle case was one of the earliest in America's culture wars. Arbuckle emerges as a sympathetic figure, but many others, including movie moguls, don’t fare as well.
The definitive account of one of Hollywood's most notorious scandals.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-792-6
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
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