As entertaining and sweeping as an engrossing Hollywood epic, and a promising source for a great documentary.
A wide-angle take on a major watershed period in American filmmaking.
Perceptive moviegoers knew that something was afoot in the late 1960s when 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its elliptical plot, mesmerizing images and ambiguous symbols, became one of the most attended and discussed films of the moment. Harris, who covers pop culture for Entertainment Weekly and other publications, chronicles what was going on. In his compelling narrative, the major “characters” become the five films nominated for the 1967 Best Picture Oscar: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, The Graduate and Doctor Doolittle. Harris demonstrates how these films bespoke Hollywood’s past and future. Doctor Doolittle, a big-budget musical, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, essentially a Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn romantic comedy, despite a plot about interracial marriage, were traditional studio-era films. The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde and, to some extent, In the Heat of the Night, introduced new cinematic techniques and structures, many imported from the works of European New Wave directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard. The groundbreaking films also dealt more directly than ever before with themes of violence, sexuality and racism. Harris vividly details the production histories, reaching back several years in some cases to examine how a cast of fascinating characters—inspired writers, determined actors, emerging directors—got these films going. With keen cultural perspective, Harris also shows how Bonnie, Clyde and Benjamin Braddock caught the tenor of the revolutionary ’60s and established, perhaps for the first time on these shores, a vital film culture.
As entertaining and sweeping as an engrossing Hollywood epic, and a promising source for a great documentary.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-152-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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