An adroit and revealing biography of the talented director of such classics as Metropolis and M. Few directors weathered the transition from silent movies to sound as successfully as Lang. His success in doing so may have been, in part, due to the fact that his aesthetic remained essentially visual, a masterful and calculated use of angles, framing, and lighting. Beyond their usefulness in creating tableaux vivants, actors were, he seemed to feel, more of an annoyance than anything else. Not surprisingly, the notoriously perfectionist Lang mistreated some very high-priced talent, including Peter Lorre, Spencer Tracy, and Marlene Dietrich, as well as a raft of hapless producers. As Henry Fonda once remarked: `` `It just doesn't occur to him that actors are human beings. . . . He is the master puppeteer, and he is happiest only when he can manipulate the blank puppets.' '' Only perhaps in M, the tale of a wretched child-killer, did Lang achieve a full and rich psychological portrait. With his ever-present monocle and soldierly bearing, Lang seemed the epitome of the autocratic Prussian, but in truth he was not only Viennese but half-Jewish and a committed leftist. Soon after Hitler came to power, Lang—then considered Germany's greatest director—went into self-imposed exile in Hollywood. He was a dedicated mythomaniac, and veteran film biographer McGilligan (Jack's Life, 1994, etc.) does an extraordinarily thorough job of separating Lang fact from Lang fable. Despite the constant battles on the set and budget overruns, Lang worked well into his 70s. His retirement years, however, were pure Sunset Boulevard, as the nearly blind Lang kept detailed diaries of the minutiae of his day, conversed with his wooden pet monkey, Peter, and had longtime live-in ex-lover Lilly Latte regularly procure him prostitutes. McGilligan is not a graceful stylist, but he has a great story to tell, and he tells it with verve, originality, and insight. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 25, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-13247-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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