Like most oral histories, a tad self-indulgent but filled with insights and good dish that movie buffs will relish.
Tape recordings made in the three years before Orson Welles’ death in 1985 capture the legendary film director’s outsized personality.
As editor Biskind (Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, 2010, etc.) explains in his introduction, Henry Jaglom talked Welles into acting in his first feature, A Safe Place, in 1971, and they became friends. Jaglom’s generation worshipped the creator of Citizen Kane as a groundbreaking auteur who pioneered their sort of personal filmmaking; Welles liked to be worshipped. By the time Jaglom began recording their conversations over lunches at Ma Maison, Welles hadn’t made a movie in 10 years, and F Is for Fake (1974) had flopped. Aided by Jaglom, he was trying to get financing for a film version of King Lear or his political script, The Big Brass Ring. But nothing came through, and Welles’ income from TV commercials had also dried up; his reputation was at a low point. In conversation, Welles shows himself eager to disprove his critics, as well as to savagely gossip about his bitterly estranged theatrical partner, John Houseman, and to comment unflatteringly on the talents of friends/rivals, from Laurence Oliver and John Huston to Marlon Brando and Peter Bogdanovich. Jaglom, an admirer but not a sycophant, occasionally protests such judgments, but he’s unfailingly supportive of a friend they both know is in the twilight of his career. Welles could be mean-spirited and insufferable, but he was also blazingly intelligent. His nailing of Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin as sharing “that particular combination of arrogance and timidity [that] sets my teeth on edge” is characteristic of his sharp wit about every aspect of moviemaking, and he’s just as smart about history, music and fine art. You can understand why his friends were so devoted.
Like most oral histories, a tad self-indulgent but filled with insights and good dish that movie buffs will relish.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9725-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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