Huge, richly researched, absorbing revisionist biography of the filmmaker renowned for standing up for ``the little man''; by the author of studies of Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and others. In 1981, McBride was asked to help prepare an homage to Capra (1897-1991) for the National Film Institute's Life Achievement award. In researching Capra, McBride discovered that the director's well-received autobiography, The Name Above the Title (1971), was a self-aggrandizing fairy tale. Although such 30's and 40's films as It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's A Wonderful Life seemingly displayed Capra as a giant talent supporting the cause of ``the little man,'' Capra was actually an insecure, anti-New Deal reactionary who always voted for the money and, as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for several years running, always stood up for the studios rather than the newly formed talent guilds and unions. In his autobiography, McBride says, Capra reinvented his career and papered over the help he had from his excellent cameraman, Joseph Walker, who gave sculptural depth and richness to all his major films, and from writers Jo Swerling, Sidney Buchman, and Robert Riskin, who wrote all ``the little man's'' speeches, devised Capra's stories, and gave edge and shape to his characters. Capra apparently also misrepresented his ties with Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn, who had (and exercised) right of final cut on all Capra pictures—although Capra trumpeted himself as a ``one man, one picture'' auteur. McBride thinks that Capra's need to appropriate credit belonging to others stemmed from insecurity about the nature of his own abilities and from a fear of success common to first-generation professionals, who often think themselves imposters. Looking at some of his pictures late in life, Capra mused, ``...they don't seem to be mine. It's difficult for me to understand.'' Superb in every way. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-73494-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
