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Somebody : the reckless life and remarkable career of Marlon Brando
Interweaves Marlon Brando's tumultuous personal life with his remarkable acting career to document the actor's troubled childhood, stage and film work, often contradictory attitude toward his craft, and the tragedies that marked his final years.
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Books: High Drama Behind the Scenes
It had not begun that way. In his wide-screen narrative, \"High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic,\" cultural historian [Glenn Frankel] follows the outrageous fortunes of the film and its creators. Fred Zinnemann was a Viennese emigre whose ideas of the Old West were derived from German potboilers. He had directed two promising newcomers, Marlon Brando (\"The Men\") and Montgomery Clift (\"The Search\") but was hardly a household name, even in the households of B-picture producers. The screenwriter, Carl Foreman, was better known to the cognoscenti; his credits included several distinguished features, including \"Champion\" and \"Cyrano de Bergerac.\" He was also known to another group: fellow members of the Communist Party, an affiliation that was to shape the drama of \"High Noon\" and blight the career of its writer. Even this failed to satisfy the old-line Communists who attacked Foreman for ideological impurity -- after all, his typewriter never stopped, so there must have been something tainted about his success. \"Some perhaps were jealous of the fact,\" observes Mr. Frankel, that the writer \"lived well in London, and that he always seemed to come out ahead financially.\" The words \"skill\" and \"proficiency\" had no place in the progressives' lexicon. Carl Foreman, who died in 1984, had in fact paid a steep price for his walk on the left side. [Gary Cooper] was back on top; Fred Zinnemann went on to become a world-class director (\"The Nun's Story,\" \"A Man for All Seasons\"). Though Foreman was eventually rehabilitated, he had lost who knows how many film projects, a Hollywood career and a marriage. In the end there was only one true workman's compensation: Like the character he created, \"I discovered that I could be scared and still come through a situation. I actually was the kind of person I thought I was.\" The movie \"High Noon,\" great in itself, is all the greater for the backstory Mr. Frankel tells.
Newspaper Article
High Drama Behind the Scenes
It had not begun that way. In his wide-screen narrative, \"High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic,\" cultural historian [Glenn Frankel] follows the outrageous fortunes of the film and its creators. Fred Zinnemann was a Viennese emigre whose ideas of the Old West were derived from German potboilers. He had directed two promising newcomers, Marlon Brando (\"The Men\") and Montgomery Clift (\"The Search\") but was hardly a household name, even in the households of B-picture producers. The screenwriter, Carl Foreman, was better known to the cognoscenti; his credits included several distinguished features, including \"Champion\" and \"Cyrano de Bergerac.\" He was also known to another group: fellow members of the Communist Party, an affiliation that was to shape the drama of \"High Noon\" and blight the career of its writer. Even this failed to satisfy the old-line Communists who attacked Foreman for ideological impurity -- after all, his typewriter never stopped, so there must have been something tainted about his success. \"Some perhaps were jealous of the fact,\" observes Mr. Frankel, that the writer \"lived well in London, and that he always seemed to come out ahead financially.\" The words \"skill\" and \"proficiency\" had no place in the progressives' lexicon. Carl Foreman, who died in 1984, had in fact paid a steep price for his walk on the left side. [Gary Cooper] was back on top; Fred Zinnemann went on to become a world-class director (\"The Nun's Story,\" \"A Man for All Seasons\"). Though Foreman was eventually rehabilitated, he had lost who knows how many film projects, a Hollywood career and a marriage. In the end there was only one true workman's compensation: Like the character he created, \"I discovered that I could be scared and still come through a situation. I actually was the kind of person I thought I was.\" The movie \"High Noon,\" great in itself, is all the greater for the backstory Mr. Frankel tells.
Newspaper Article
REVIEW --- Books: High Drama Behind the Scenes
The federal government required employees to sign a loyalty oath; the private sector followed. Summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, scores of writers, directors, actors and executives made full confessions.
Newspaper Article
Films in Fraught Times
According to Mr. [Nick Smedley]'s overview, the American film colony warmly embraced FDR's liberal idealism of the 1930s. But in the 1940s, when the New Deal came increasingly under attack from Republicans, Hollywood did not rally a liberal defense and instead responded with \"a cinema of alienation and anxiety\" -- in movies such as \"Key Largo,\" \"The Big Sleep\" and \"The Maltese Falcon.\" In both decades, we're told, \"American films were unrelenting in their hostility towards women and female self-determination.\" By the time the movie was released in 1942, his \"personal statement,\" which might have seemed a criticism of his adopted country's neutrality, was attacked for not taking the Nazis seriously. Mr. Smedley glancingly mentions the altogether different reception that met Charlie Chaplin's Nazi-lampooning \"The Great Dictator\" in 1940 but doesn't weigh the movie in any serious way because the author has decided that [Ernst Lubitsch], [Billy Wilder] and [Fritz Lang] are his \"control group\" and has \"deliberately omitted\" consideration of other emigre directors in Hollywood, such as the British-born Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock. The Hollywood western also comes in for re-evaluation. To Mr. [J. Hoberman], as to many other critics, \"High Noon\" (1952) -- about a town marshal who cannot raise any help and faces a gang of outlaws by himself -- can be explained as an allegory of Cold War blacklisting in Hollywood. Only a handful of outspoken actors and directors refused to play the committee's game by testifying or naming names, and they paid the price of ostracism and unemployment. But, as Mr. Hoberman acknowledges, there is another way of interpreting \"High Noon\": \"Just as Marshall Kane cleaned up Hadleyville, making it safe for women and children, so the Truman Doctrine had maintained that it was now America's obligation 'to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.' (And as Kane was deserted by the selfish townspeople, so congressional Republicans had attacked Truman as a 'do gooder.')\"
Newspaper Article
REVIEW --- Books: Films in Fraught Times
According to Mr. Smedley's overview, the American film colony warmly embraced FDR's liberal idealism of the 1930s.
Newspaper Article
Illusions of magic
During his dazzling career he escaped from coffins buried under water, threaded needles with his tongue, dangled upside-down from the top of a Manhattan skyscraper while wriggling free of heavy padlocks, made a two-ton elephant vanish on the stage of the Hippodrome Theater and spoke to ectoplasmic figures of the dead. Here is the great man performing before thousands in the U.S. on the Continent, and in Britain, where a cartoon in Judge shows America shackled with post-World War I \"Blue Laws,\" \"Anti-Evolutionists,\" \"Book, Drama and Film censorship\" and a \"Free Speech Gag.\"
Newspaper Article
REVIEW --- Books: Reign of the Taste-Makers
Mr. Mordden observes that Schultz's end was a New Deal death, of absolute evil absolutely unmourned in an age rich in transition: from grand hotels to nightclubs, from ghetto aliens to assimilated commentators on American life; and, coming up next, from a racially segregated show business to a racially integrated show business.
Newspaper Article