A satisfying effort to sift through celluloid mythology. (47 b&w photos)
Film historian Louvish continues his presentation of classic laff artists, moving backward from the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business, 2000) and Laurel and Hardy (Stan and Ollie, 2002) to tackle legendary Mack Sennett (1880–1960), impresario of hefty bathing beauties and protean boss of the Keystone Kops.
From the start, Louvish undertakes to separate fantasy from possibility by revising Father Goose, a 1934 bio by Sennett’s drinking buddy Gene Fowler, and Mack’s own imaginative King of Comedy, now a half-century old. Walter Kerr dubbed Sennett the “insensitive master carpenter” of comedy, and this text doesn’t refute that characterization. In his studios, Sennett constructed an insane parallel universe. It operated contrary to known laws of physics while adhering to comedic law. The early half-reelers, peopled with stock characters, had no sensitivity, decorum, or plausibility. The Kops and the beauties were supported by simpering suitors, jealous husbands, flirty flappers, mustachioed villains, and harridans, all filmed with an under-cranked camera as they flung pies, brandished rolling pins, hid under beds, and encountered bears. Whether based at Keystone or Triangle, Sennett employed all the greats: Arbuckle, Bevan, Busch, Chaplin, Fields, Langdon, Turpin, Teddy the dog, and a toothless lion. Heading the cast was wonderful, winsome Mabel Normand, the love of Mack’s life—or so it was publicized. (His sexual leanings remain undetermined.) The final fade-out is, inevitably, sad. Yet it’s a spirited tale about a lord of show business with a happy emphasis on his shows over his business. Supported by newly available files and treatments, Louvish takes an easygoing tone that sometimes leads to muddled metaphors like “another building block of the great Mabel-Mae prize-fight proves to be of shoddy construction.” But he consistently displays solid familiarity with Sennett’s oeuvre and, especially, the unique ways of Hollywood.
A satisfying effort to sift through celluloid mythology. (47 b&w photos)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-571-21276-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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
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