This definitive biography of Clyde Bruckman is everything you always wanted to know (and more) about the little-known...
Film scholar and essayist Dessem goes deep in his debut book about a seminal but largely forgotten figure of early Hollywood history.
The Gag Man could easily be the title of one of the films that writer/director Clyde Bruckman (1894-1955) created for Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, W. C. Fields, or Laurel and Hardy; it has the same straightforward punch as The Navigator, The General, or even The Fatal Glass of Beer. The title of the last-named film—one of Fields’ biggest hits—proved all-too-prophetic. Bruckman ascended to the stratosphere of the comedy film profession, but drink pulled him back down; by the end, he was recycling gags for The Three Stooges. As Dessem notes, “No more features, no more premieres, no more stars—only Stooges.” Bruckman finally etched his own end credit by committing suicide with a gun he’d borrowed from his old pal Keaton. This book is an expansion of Dessem’s superb 2014 essay for the now-defunct website The Dissolve, but the added freedom it affords him is a mixed blessing. The author has a keen eye for offhanded detail; for example, he relates how the soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. Keaton told a judge, “As a husband, Buster was an excellent comedian.” However, Dessem too often gives in to his film-geek side; for instance, he tells the story of an exceptionally painful lawsuit that Lloyd filed against Bruckman in excruciating detail. This is doubly annoying because Dessem’s critical insights are so exhilarating, as in this passage, in which he compares and contrasts a handful of classic comedians: “Keaton responded to tribulations with stoicism; Lloyd with optimism. Laurel and Hardy were boneheaded, but looked out for each other; even W.C. Fields…was smart and would usually just as soon be left alone. The Stooges were something else, a perfect storm of stupidity and viciousness.” Alas, Bruckman found himself in his own storm of alcoholism and failure; late in the book, Dessem recounts a conversation between Bruckman and Keaton about the ending of The Navigator. The former insisted that the story should’ve ended with Keaton and the girl on a sinking lifeboat. “Oh, it was in the books for us to die all right,” Keaton allowed. “But not in the jokebooks. We were making a comedy, remember?” Somehow, Bruckman forgot to remember.
This definitive biography of Clyde Bruckman is everything you always wanted to know (and more) about the little-known filmmaker.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941629-19-2
Page Count: 362
Publisher: The Critical Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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