This is an often fascinating slice of Hollywood history, although it is geared primarily to serious film buffs.
The “legends” interviewed by film historian and biographer McGilligan (Fritz Lang, 1997, etc.) are mostly directors whose careers date back to the silent movie days. His anthology brings together a dozen pieces published during the 1970s.
By the time McGilligan, often accompanied by a co-interviewer, caught up with the subjects, most were in their 80s. Never intrusive, the journalists asked just enough questions to kickstart reminiscences. Raoul Walsh recollects how Humphrey Bogart was cast in High Sierra only after George Raft turned it down because he superstitiously didn’t want to die in the end. Clarence Brown talks about Greta Garbo (he was her favorite director) and an 11-year-old actress named Elizabeth Taylor. The one connecting thread among them (and René Clair, George Stevens, actress-turned-director Ida Lupino, and William Wellman) is the happenstance that brought them to their profession. Joel McCrea provides an actor’s view of other legendary directors such as King Vidor and William Wyler. Sheridan Gibney and Dore Shary provide two of the livelier stories: Gibney, a screenwriter who thought of himself mainly as a playwright, became embroiled in the difficulties of the Screen Writers Guild during the 1940s, while Schary, who became a studio executive, recalls his screenwriting days as his happiest. As René Clair likens films to sparkling water to explain why a film can never affect audiences the same way years after it was produced, so McGilligan’s anthology is more archival than immediate. The filmography and introductory essay that introduce each section make for a pleasing format, although the overall style is sometimes distractingly inconsistent. The interview with Ronald Reagan during his 1976 primary campaign seems to belong in another book. The concluding interview with Alfred Hitchcock smacks of promotion for the author’s forthcoming biography.
This is an often fascinating slice of Hollywood history, although it is geared primarily to serious film buffs.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26131-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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
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