While it can get bogged down in the minutiae of camera angles, set details, and the tedium of production, this is an...
Curtis (Spencer Tracy, 2011, etc.) details just about every aspect of director and film production designer William Cameron Menzies (1896-1957).
The author’s writing style allows readers to actually feel the methods Menzies used as he fractured perspective and created specific moods with angles and shadows. Undoubtedly, Menzies was the first and greatest master of film staging, art direction, and what is now known as production design. From his first great triumph in The Thief of Bagdad (1925) to Around the World in 80 Days (1956), he spent nearly every waking hour designing settings and sketching out every camera angle for every shot. When we hear of storyboards, we have this man to thank for inventing them. Having a sketch showing exactly what was needed saved hours of time and materials. Some directors, such as Sam Wood, relied entirely on Menzies’ work. Together, they produced wonderful films until Wood dissolved their partnership over politics during the 1950s. Curtis provides wonderful sections about his subject’s groundbreaking work on Our Town (1940) and an extended chapter devoted to Gone with the Wind (1939). Working for David Selznick on that picture was one of the most difficult assignments, as the producer was wont to micromanage, changing schedules, calling meetings, and then arriving late. Menzies was a significant part of the history of filmmaking, from silent films to sound pictures, the advents of color, 3D, and Cinerama. At the birth of TV, he worked on Halls of Ivy with Ronald Colman. While he was vital to the movie industry, with the exception of the first Oscar awarded for art direction, plaudits and applause were limited to those few who understood his contributions. Fortunately, Curtis fills in all the missing pieces.
While it can get bogged down in the minutiae of camera angles, set details, and the tedium of production, this is an illuminating, long-overdue book about the man who taught the world how to make a good film.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-375-42472-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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