While it can get bogged down in the minutiae of camera angles, set details, and the tedium of production, this is an...
Curtis (Spencer Tracy, 2011, etc.) details just about every aspect of director and film production designer William Cameron Menzies (1896-1957).
The author’s writing style allows readers to actually feel the methods Menzies used as he fractured perspective and created specific moods with angles and shadows. Undoubtedly, Menzies was the first and greatest master of film staging, art direction, and what is now known as production design. From his first great triumph in The Thief of Bagdad (1925) to Around the World in 80 Days (1956), he spent nearly every waking hour designing settings and sketching out every camera angle for every shot. When we hear of storyboards, we have this man to thank for inventing them. Having a sketch showing exactly what was needed saved hours of time and materials. Some directors, such as Sam Wood, relied entirely on Menzies’ work. Together, they produced wonderful films until Wood dissolved their partnership over politics during the 1950s. Curtis provides wonderful sections about his subject’s groundbreaking work on Our Town (1940) and an extended chapter devoted to Gone with the Wind (1939). Working for David Selznick on that picture was one of the most difficult assignments, as the producer was wont to micromanage, changing schedules, calling meetings, and then arriving late. Menzies was a significant part of the history of filmmaking, from silent films to sound pictures, the advents of color, 3D, and Cinerama. At the birth of TV, he worked on Halls of Ivy with Ronald Colman. While he was vital to the movie industry, with the exception of the first Oscar awarded for art direction, plaudits and applause were limited to those few who understood his contributions. Fortunately, Curtis fills in all the missing pieces.
While it can get bogged down in the minutiae of camera angles, set details, and the tedium of production, this is an illuminating, long-overdue book about the man who taught the world how to make a good film.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-375-42472-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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