Lally, managing editor of The Film Journal, offers the first Wilder biography in several years, covering the director's last films. Billy Wilder was a trailblazer: As Lally points out, he was one of the directors who dragged Hollywood kicking and screaming into the real world, pursuing subject matter that the industry generally wouldn't touch. Whether it was adultery (Double Indemnity), alcoholism (The Lost Weekend), the megalomania of fame (Sunset Boulevard), or media irresponsibility (Ace in the Hole), Wilder turned his often jaundiced eye on phenomena that made the Production Code office squirm. He was born in 1906 in Galicia, an area of Poland that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, a perpetual business failure, pulled the family all over that empire, but most of Wilder's youth was spent in Vienna. Streetwise and energetic, Wilder worked his way into journalism and moved to Berlin in the last heady days of the Weimar Republic. In 1929, after a long campaign, he landed work as a screenwriter, gaining experience and contacts that would prove crucial to his career in America. Wilder fled Germany when the Nazis rose to power, going first to Paris and then, in 1934, on to New York and Hollywood. (His mother, stepfather, and grandmother died in Auschwitz.) After a brief false start, Wilder's career began a meteoric rise: A great success as a screenwriter at Paramount, he swiftly moved into a director's chair, had a string of hits, and made several successful comebacks. Lally tells this story competently and thoroughly. He has talked to Wilder (a notoriously difficult man to interview) and has some fresh insights into the films, although he is often quick to reduce them to their themes. An intelligent if somewhat plodding biography that gets most of its occasional sparkle from the wit of Wilder himself. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 7, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-3119-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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