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Suddenly, Last Summer
"My son, Sebastian and I constructed our days. Each day we would carve each day like a piece of sculpture, leaving behind us a trail of days like a gallery of sculpture until suddenly, last summer."
"Most people's lives, what are they but trails of debris - each day more debris, more debris... long, long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it all up but death."
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In Suddenly, Last Summer, Elizabeth Taylor is in an asylum where she's been hidden to keep her from "babbling" about what happened to Cousin Sebastian, the deceased son who used his mother Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn) and then cousin Catherine Holly (Taylor) to attract young men. The film spells out what's happening in this arrangement but never makes it exactly clear, using hints of cannibalism and lechery as being sort of equal, at least when it comes to young boys, and thus when Sebastian comes to a gruesome end (apparently consumed by starving street kids during a trip to Spain) Taylor's character witnesses the murder and has a wild, crazed mental breakdown.
Violet Venable worships her dead son, tells everyone he died of a heart attack, and works hard to keep the truth from getting out (that her son was homosexual? Or that he had traded her for Elizabeth Taylor because mother 'had lost her attractiveness'? She may be obsessed with her son, but she's also satanically vain.)
Lobotomy "will make them peaceful"
Whatever it is that motivates the wealthy Violet Venable, she won't be stopped, and consequently enlists the brilliant surgeon Dr. John Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) and sets about getting a lobotomy performed on Catherine, pronto. She uses inheritance money as a way to control Catherine Holly's family, and a proposed endowment to control the hospital where Doc Cukrowicz is working. Since Catherine has been making a nuisance of herself at the Catholic mental hospital where she is staying (the blinkered nuns only drive Taylor's character toward further craziness) everyone is convinced a lobotomy is a logical way to 'cure' the suffering Catherine, but Cukrowicz isn't sure and wants to investigate the matter on his own.
The back-story is then unraveled, including the main promotional gambit of the film, which is Elizabeth Taylor in a tight one-piece white swimsuit. [An image used extensively after Taylor's death as an obituary illustration of the star.]
Footage of Taylor in the swimsuit is featured prominently in the film's 1959 promotional preview/trailer. It isn't particularly important to the film's story except that the headless body of Sebastian (we never see his face throughout the whole film, which mimics the many headless images of men found in the paintings and sculpture around Sebastian's poetry studio back in New Orleans) is shown strolling past Taylor in the swimsuit kneeling in the sand at his feet, as if to underline that this fellow simply isn't interested in girls. In an era of Hollywood in which Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were flourishing, Taylor in the white suit may have just been a natural way to compete in that arms-race, but in Taylor's pix, there is no pretense at enjoying it, she seems hardened and possibly angry.
Taylor was paid the huge sum (by 1959 standards) of $500,000 to appear in the movie.
"Madness is the most horrible doom upon this earth"
Katherine Hepburn upstages most of what is happening in Suddenly, Last Summer by seeming completely nuts. As this film was made before the rash of aging-movie-stars-go-crazy films of the 1960s (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane; Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, etc.) it did create a mold for the gothic doom of these later movies. In fact, Suddenly, Last Summer has a steady foot squarely planted in the horror film genre, from the sometimes lush to alternatively creepy music, the theme of debasement and cosmic terror, and plenty of lunacy. The art direction on Suddenly is opulent and packed with background nick-knacks like a Hammer horror film, punctuated by various scenes of decay in New Orleans, Spain and the under funded state mental hospital where brain-doctor Cukrowicz works. To make the atmosphere even plainer, Director Mankiewicz throws in various death images like James Whale did in the 1931 Frankenstein.
"The dinosaurs were vegetarians, that's why they became extinct... and then the carnivores inherited the earth, but then they always do..."
Mankiewicz starts the film with a loving overview of all the sharp steel tools a surgeon uses, finally settling on Doc Cukrowicz, who is then at that moment using the knives to enter a human brain. Later, there's the queasiness brought on by the freak-show presentation of the men's and women's wings of the state lunatic asylum, peopled with the vulnerable and the domineeringly violent, like the heavy-set female patient who reigns over the female inmates from a chair that recalls the throne where earlier Mrs. Venerable held forth on the poetic superiority of her son (who, when living, was a kind of sidekick sitting beside her in a carved antique jesters chair.)
Early in the film, Mrs. Venable recounts to Cukrowicz how on a trip to the Pacific Encantadas Islands Sebastian watched the life cycle of giant sea turtles, and how the emerging baby turtles try to get from their sand-pit birthplaces into the water before hordes of dark flesh-eating birds can kill them. Sebastian relates to his mother that through this spectacle he had seen 'the face of God.'
Who's crazy?
The plot is the mystery of whether Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor) is truly crazy and what the 'unspeakable' activities were of the dead Sebastian who is worshipped by his still living mother (Hepburn) who wants to have the last say in explaining Sebastian to the world, to Cukrowicz (and to us). The emphasis by Mrs. Venable is that he was a great poet, in the manner of other great professions, like doctors, for example, "using people creatively" in their work. It sounds like all too much hyperbole, but it's all we have to go on after Cukrowicz's long interview with Mrs Venable at the start of the film.
"Sebastian was a vocation, not a man..."
That is, until Elizabeth Taylor takes over the narrative, and the story goes from a crazy young man's indictment of God (because nature is mad and violent, so must God be) into an indictment of a crazy young man who used people and sought self-destruction and the alleviation of boredom as if the two were the same thing.
Not that Taylor's character can clearly remember what happened to Sebastian. She does not say he was crazy, rather, her view was that Sebastian was kind and gentle, and was making himself into an inexplicable 'sacrifice.'
She then notes that Doc Cukrowicz has blue eyes, we hear an echo of what Mrs. Venable said, that Sebastian would have liked Cukrowicz, but there is a great darkness in the seeming compliment: Catherine's mumbles under effect of a sedative that Sebastian was "famished for the light ones, through with the dark ones. It was how he talked about people, like they were items on a menu."
The portrait that develops from the combination of testimonies is that Mrs. Venable kept Sebastian much like the pet Venus flytrap that is fed expensive imported flies, and likewise within their social realm the pair were always busy drawing to them "a perfect little troupe of young and beautiful people around us, always."
"Isn't that what love is, using people? Maybe that's what hate is... not being able to use people."
"...We're getting, and listen to this, in big round beautiful figures, one million dollars!"
Mrs. Venable likes Cukrowicz (whose last name means "sugar" in Polish, learning this, Mrs. Venable promptly calls him "Dr. Sugar") and as the story progresses she clearly begins to confuse her dead son with the living Doctor. Cukrowicz's boss (Albert Dekker as Dr. Hockstader) is counting on the attachment Mrs. Venable has to smooth the way for a large endowment to finance a new hospital building. The only catch is the lobotomy. Catherine Holly (Taylor) is a fly already in the mouth of the 'devouring organism', and Cukrowicz has an important role to play in order to seal the deal.
Cukrowicz: 'insane' is such a meaningless word.'
Catherine: "But lobotomy has a precise meaning, hasn't it?"
But Cukrowicz isn't willing to be manipulated so easily, and though Mrs. Venable makes it clear there will be no money unless the lobotomy is performed, she is strangely compelled to do whatever Cukrowicz demands, an odd reaction from such an imperious woman, but then Mrs. Venable has confused Cukrowicz with the dead Sebastian, and as Catherine Holly mentioned earlier, no one could resist giving Sebastian whatever he wanted from them, including his mother.
WIth the money for the hospital hanging over Doc Hockstader's head by Mrs. Venable, and likewise Catherine's greedy mother (Mercedes McCambridge) and brother (Gary Raymond) unable to get to inheritance money from Sebastian's will with Mrs. Venable's lawyers holding it up in probate court, Cukrowicz brings a showdown by gathering all the principals to the veranda aside "Sebastians garden" which looks like a jungle scene from a prehistoric monster movie. After an injection of Sodium Pentothal from Cukrowicz, Catherine is instructed to tell her story of what happened to Sebastian on their trip together to europe, and despite heckling from "Aunt Vi" and interjections from Catherine's family about past sensitive subjects (for example, Catherines quasi-rape by an unnamed 'married gentleman' from their social set), she flashbacks the tale of Sebastian's gruesome demise.
Eat the Rich
Catherine Holly tells us: "Suddenly, last summer, he wasn't young anymore." In Tennessee WIlliams/Gore Vidal's screenplay, the cast regularly repeats the film title:
- "Suddenly, last summer, he became restless..." (Referring to Sebastian)
- "Suddenly, last winter I began to write my journal in the third person" (Catherine)
- "Suddenly, last summer Cousin Sebastian changed to the afternoons and the beach."
And Sebastian's death is also sudden: he was planning to make for the northern european countries and the blonde-haired, blue-eyed people there. But from living on a diet of "pills and salads" and a palpitating heart condition that "frightened him" and "his eyes looked dazed" he suddenly abrogates his modus operandi of 'never interfering,' a philosophy for which Catherine provides the exegesis to the doctor (and us). Describing the penultimate moment when she and Sebastian are confronted by half-naked, starving children at a restaurant, the boys serenading them with harsh noises from junk-metal instruments (and not too subtly, one of them playing something like a guitar made from a turtle shell), they are shouting "vile things to the waiters" about Sebastian who had been paying the boys off daily for something like "shining his shoes:"
Cukrowicz: "Did he complain about it to the manager?"
Catherine: "What manager, God? You don't understand my cousin."
Cukrowicz: "What do you mean?"
Catherine: "He... accepted all, as how things are, thought that nobody had any right to complain or interfere in anyway whatsoever. Even though he knew what was awful, was awful, what was wrong, was wrong. He thought it unfitting to ever take any action about anything whatsoever, except to go on doing as something within him directed."
Catherine calls this his mistake, not the philosophy, which is certainly a convenient one for a wealthy man slumming among the poor, and the Procuress accompanying him, but rather that he rose up and complained, wanting the restaurant manager to drive off the children (which, in the play version, are chased away by weapon-wielding waiters and chefs).
Disgusted and outraged (Sebastian: "Don't look at the little monsters. Beggars are a social disease in this country. If you look at them, you get sick of the country, it spoils the whole country for you...") Sebastian leaves the restaurant, only to again be confronted in the street by the ranks of boys, Catherine pleading with him to return to the restaurant or to retreat to the harbor. Instead, Sebastian, who never runs anywhere (according to Catherine) tries to flee the boys by transversing the steep stone-streets of Cabeza de Lobo, only to end up on a peak at a place that Catherine says looks like a "ruined temple." Catherine follows, and reaching the top, picks up a stone, apparently ready to fight, and sees the boys devouring Sebastian, eating and cutting him to pieces with sharp metal.
The catharsis of finally remembering what happened overwhelms Catherine and the listeners, particularly Mrs. Venable, who begins speaking to Doc Cukrowicz as if he is Sebastian. She leads Cukrowicz inside, exulting as they walk arm-and-arm to Venable's ornate elevator-chair which, as it hoists Venable up into the mansion's upper floor, tells the silently observing Cukrowicz,
"Of course God is cruel, we didn't need to come to the Encantadas and look at the turtles to find that out. No, we've always known about Him, the savage face he shows to people, and the fierce things he shouts, it's all we really ever see or hear of Him now, and no one seems to know why..."
"The difference is, we know about Him, the others don't, that's where we're lucky..."
"Oh, Sebastian, what a lovely summer its been, just the two of us, Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian, just the way it's always going to be. Oh, we are lucky, my darling, to have one another and need no one else, ever..."
Everyone (except Cukrowicz) is astounded by the revelation of the story and Venable's reaction, realizing that the accusations that Catherine murdered Sebastian (leveled by Mrs. Venable but not really taken seriously by anyone) was only a shade different from the truth.
Cukrowicz leaves the disappeared Mrs. Venable and her mansion to find Catherine, who is moodily observing the dark pool of water before Sebastian's poetry studio. Cukrowicz calls to her and she answers "she's here, Miss Catherine's here," signifying that she is in her right mind (and was, more or less, through the whole story) and they exit together, holding hands.
Summation
The Story:
Like most Tennessee Williams' movies, the southerners are sweating heavily (particularly poor Albert Dekker). Taylor is bathed either in water or sweat during the sections of the story that flashback to "Cabeza de Lobo" ("wolf's head"), but otherwise she, Clift, Hepburn and the headless Sebastian seem cool and collected through most of the tale, batting the dialogue back and forth, piecing together the mystery of what happened to Catherine and Sebastian on their fatal Mediterranean holiday.
But the mystery that shadows the whole film is Sebastian and his mother. As much as Sebastian groomed Catherine for her role to procure "contacts" for him while they were in Europe, a role she was awarded after Mrs. Venable lost her spot due to a "hysterical stroke," more so in the film is the evidence that Mrs. Venable groomed Sebastian for a particular role from his birth, that jesters chair beside her throne no novelty, but a task to perform.
We know Sebastian strained to preserve his youth, but we also know Mrs. Venable did the same, and apparently through Sebastian she used him to procure the beautiful, young people they each dined out on in a hopeless bid to fend off aging.
We see that Mrs. Venable is the one who taught Sebastian the destroying philosophy of "using people creatively," (which Mrs. Venable acted out upon her son) and the malignant self-deception of equally accepting 'everything' as it is while simultaneously hiding and averting the eyes from what that 'everything" is.
During the briefly related episode in which Sebastian swore off his wealth, shaved his head and went to India to be a beggar, we also hear it was Mrs. Venable who followed suite and eventually talked Sebastian back to his rightful place at her side at the "Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo and the Ritz in Paris."
With the image of Mrs. Venable and Sebastian on one side, a pathetic mirror image is Mrs. Holly and her son, George, who inherits the deceased Sebastians clothing. Stuck in the middle is Catherine Holly, who can see through the deceptions and feints of both the Venable's and her own family, and resists them all (including Sebastian, who literally has to drag the fighting Catherine into the waters of Cabeza de Lobo to make her perform her role as 'the Procuress,' something Mrs. Venable did gladly).
Dressed in Sebastian's white Shantung silk suits, George tries to manipulate Catherine so that he will have the advantage of the money Sebastian willed him, but held up in probate by "Aunt Vi's" lawyers. This gets him nowhere, as Catherine is not willing to take one for the team if it means a lobotomy. Mrs. Holly weeps, and groans, and tries to force the issue, but Catherine is immune to these manipulations.
As a bizarre Christ-figure (or anti-Jesus), Sebastian repeats the truth as he and his mother want it to be, dressed in white and leading Catherine through Europe, but he ends up like the dead turtles of the Encantadas, and with his "Poem of Summer" unwritten he proves to have gone sterile. Instead it is Doc Cukrowicz who cures Catherine, saves her from the mechanization of all the duplicitous people around her, and to make the picture of 'competing saviours' stronger, makes her walk again, in the scene where the Sodium Pentothal is administered. (in Williams' play, as written, Dr. Cukrowicz is blonde and 'shines' in the sunlight, dresses in white and is 'glacially brilliant').
The physical setting of the film is communicated well: it looks like New Orleans (Hollywood style) and the flashbacks look like the western Mediterranean (the real thing, shot on location). It is supposed to be the year 1937, but it simply isn't: it is clearly 1959 and you have to pay attention to spot the instances where they try to fake the earlier era. Mostly we're looking at Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, and they're wearing 1959 styles.
Probably lobotomy is the item most rooted in the 1937 setting, as the primitive nature of the procedure at that time (burring holes through the skull to reach the brain) was replaced by a different method in the 1940s (for which Tennessee WIlliams' sister Rose was subjected in 1943 by their mother, Edwina).
The Film:
It is a well-made film for such a wordy script (Gore Vidal did the honors). Mankiewicz opens the film up to larger vistas once the story gets past the stage-bound claustrophobia of the early scenes in the jungle/garden (which serve a purpose of telling us about how "Aunt Vi" and Sebastian lived: closed in, incestuously cannibalizing themselves).
Hepburn is very good as the wealthy mother/devourer. She does not come off as a monster, but as fragile, scared, arrogant and self-serving. Is she trying to shut-up Catherine to protect her sons reputation, or is she trying to have Catherine lobotomized to hide the truth from herself? It's a fair question since Hepburn makes Mrs. Venable seem like a lost woman hypnotized before a mirror holding her own reflection.
Mercedes McCambridge doesn't have much to do here as Mrs. Holly except connect story plot-points together. Yes, she's a terrible mother and willing to sacrifice the daughter to benefit the son (and herself), but she's also working very hard to convince herself that a lobotomy is a legitimate, logical choice under the circumstances. McCambridge plays Mrs. Holly as a woman forever bursting into tears whenever her daughter Catherine talks straight and sanely, which is nearly every scene with Taylor and McCambridge together, thus she is crying a lot.
Elizabeth Taylor is both architecture and recording machine, replaying everything that happened in Sebastian's death by misadventure. From the first scene with her, she is supremely angry, and that rarely lets up, and it becomes a particularly potent combination once we get to the flashbacks when her character Catherine is humiliated by being dragged into the waters at Cabeza de Lobo so that the local boys can gawk at her in the wet white swimsuit (Mankiewicz spends enough footage on the event to make sure we will gawk, too. It's no accident he shows one of the Spanish boys rapidly chewing through a piece of fruit while staring at Taylor in the dripping-wet swimwear.)
Though she sometimes modulates through a scene effortlessly with a firm voice and a relaxed, sullen physical presence, other times she rises to the dialogue with a brittle, thin delivery: this is matched by Montgomery Clift, who makes you follow his expressive hands as they add punctuation to his simple, straightforward line delivery, but his sometimes hunched shoulders and washed out posture make Doc Cukrowicz look both sleepy and nervous at the same time.
But he is the man anchoring the story onscreen. He doesn't have any bravura scenes like both of the female leads, instead staying calm, either certain or quizzical, and herding everything and everyone toward the climactic ending. And, while everyone else is looking shocked at the finale, he seems to have guessed the whole matter right from the beginning.
Albert Drekker drawls through his lines perfectly as head doctor Hockstader, and like a Tennessee Williams' character ought to, huffing, smoking, stalking and frowning as the proposed endowment seems to slink further and further out of reach.
Gary Raymond has the thankless task of playing a sort of cartoon version of 'Cousin Sebastian,' receiving the dead mans clothing and hoping for the $50,000 inheritance promised, the first real money the Holly family had seen since "1929 killed father." He seems to have no effect on those around him at all. Usually a Williams' film version throws in at least one redeeming quality for the worthless, greedy family relation: but it is missing here.
Montgomery Clift
Montgomery Clift is said to have been in bad shape during the making of the movie. Though able to carry off scenes expertly with relaxed but expressive hand gestures and voice tone, there's also a brittle quality and something like tremors affecting his physical performance:
"Monty's health was rapidly deteriorating, and the entire production would have been canceled had Elizabeth not pulled rank on Mankiewicz, who wanted to shut it down after Monty fell ill as a result of washing down too many codeine pills with brandy in Tennessee [Williams] Savoy suite one night. Having hitched his wagon to Elizabeth's star, the director now meekly deferred to her..."
From the book "Elizabeth Taylor: The Most Beautiful Woman in the World" by Ellis Amburn, published by HarperCollins, 2000. Page 118 amazon.com
Katherine Hepburn
About Hepburn's role in Suddenly, Last Summer:
"Kate grew increasingly agitated in the role of the doting mother whose only son, Sebastian, has died under mysterious circumstances. Mrs. Venable has fabricated an elaborate story to explain what happened to Sebastian. Her niece Catherine (played by Elizabeth Taylor), who witnessed the young man's horrific death, poses the sole threat to Mrs. Venable's sanitized account. Mrs. Venable seeks to have Catherine lobotomized at a state hospital so that the truth will never come out.
In the story of the traumatized young witness and the parent eager to prevent her from remembering, the parallels to Kate's own past were in escapable [i.e., Hepburn's brother Tom died by hanging, an apparent suicide, discovered in the family home by the then13 year old Katherine.]
"If you only knew what it means to me when I have to say those things!" she shouted at Joseph Mankiewicz, who was directing the film.
Mankiewicz and the producer Sam Spiegel presumed Hepburn was merely prudish about Williams's treatment of homosexuality and other sexual themes. "That's the play, and that's what we have to do," the director replied.
Hepburn decided that she must distance herself from the material by making Mrs. Venable seem mad. Mankiewicz, mistaking her agitation for a desire to take over the picture, fought her every step of the way. The result was unbearable tension on the set. On the last day of filming, Hepburn spat in Mankiewicz's face as a parting gesture.
She strode into Spiegel's office. "You're just a pig in a silk suit who sends flowers!" Kate informed him. Then she spat on the floor and marched out.
From the book "Katherine Hepburn" by Barbara Leaming, page 481-482, 2004. Available from amazon.com
Mankiewicz supposable said later about Hepburn: "The most experienced amateur actress in the world."
Spitting
The dilemma between Clift, Hepburn and Mankiewicz seems to be lore recorded from various angles:
"...Shooting commenced. Almost at once, the major problem of the production exploded. Montgomery Clift, playing the male lead, was in bad shape. Death (not far off) had begun its flirtation.
This excellent young actor, once so full of promise, had been ill in mind and body for some time. The reunion with Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he was deeply in love, was, to say the least, disturbing. He found it difficult to achieve a working balance, lost sleep, began to drink, had difficulty with memorization, and found it necessary to rely on artificial stimuli to get him going each day.
Elizabeth Taylor was compassionate but there was nothing she could do. Mankiewicz and Spiegel, under great pressure of schedule and budget, were less sympathetic.
...Kate felt that Spiegel and Mankiewicz might have had greater forbearance for an actor in trouble and resented the fact they had not helped more.
She considered (rightly or wrongly) that they had been downright cruel.
On her last day of shooting, Mankiewicz came to her and said, "that's it."
She asked, "Are you sure?"
"Quite sure."
"There's nothing more you're going to need me for?" she asked. "No looping, no pick-up shots, no retakes.?"
"I've got it all, Kate," said Mankiewicz, "and it's great. You're great."
"You're sure, she persisted, "that I'm absolutely finished in the picture?"
Mankiewicz grinned his characteristic grin, and said, "Absolutely, Kate. What is all this?"
"I just want to leave you," said Kate, "with this." Whereupon she spat."
From the book Tracy and Hepburn, by Garson Kanin, Viking Press, 1970. Page 222. Amazon
The Garden
In the Williams' one-act play of Suddenly, Last Summer the garden is described as:
"...a fantastic garden which is more like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to skin. The colors of this jungle-garden are violent, especially since it is steaming with heat after rain."
A photograph of the model used for construction of the garden for the film is at the web site Victoria and Albert Museum, which has a section on the work of Oliver Messel (1904 - 1978). They have a very good overview of Messel's work on Suddenly, Last Summer here.
"Suddenly, Last Summer," filmed version of the Tennessee Williams' play
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Screenplay by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams
[Combined with the play "Something Unspoken," a double bill was presented under the title of "Garden District" on January 7, 1958 at the York Playhouse in New York, off-Broadway.]
Film Cast:
- Elizabeth Taylor - Catherine Holly
- Katharine Hepburn - Mrs. Violet Venable
- Montgomery Clift - Dr. John Cukrowicz
- Albert Dekker - Dr. Hockstader
- Mercedes McCambridge - Mrs. Grace Holly
- Gary Raymond - George Holly
- Mavis Villiers - Miss Foxhill
- Patricia Marmont - Nurse Benson
- Joan Young - Sister Felicity
- Maria Britneva - Lucy
Run Time: 114 minutes
Production: May 26, 1959 to September 4, 1959
Filmed at:
- Shepperton Studios near London, England
- Beach scenes at Cataluna, Spain
- Overlooking harbor scene at Balearic Islands, Spain.
Premier: Los Angeles, December 1959; General release on Dec 22, 1959
Amazon.com DVD or online streaming video
Original Page June 2011 | Last updated Dec 2011
New Jean Harlow book
I've not seen a copy of the book yet, but simply put, the Vieira Hollywood picture-books are the best albums on Hollywood, bar none, for well over a decade now. No one puts as much attention to the production aspects, design, picture choices, and then ladles the whole affair with affection and admiration in the text. Classic Hollywood has not had a modern explainer and admirer like Vieira for decades now, and the taste and skill brought to bear on his books make them both readable-fun and collectible (some of his past books are out of print and instead of dropping down to the remainder pricing so many used Hollywood books seem to end up at, his instead get harder to find and buy).
Book is by Darrell Rooney and Mark Vieira, 240 pages, Angel City Press. Available from amazon.com
New Book: Broken Silence: Conversations with 23 Silent Film Stars
This is a collection of 23 original interviews with stars of the silent screen, with biographical information and a filmography included for each.
Interviewed are Lew Ayres, William Bakewell, Lina Basquette, Madge Bellamy, Eleanor Boardman, Ethlyne Clair, Junior Coghlan, Joyce Compton, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Dorothy Gulliver, Maxine Elliott Hicks, Dorothy Janis, George Lewis, Marion Mack, Patsy Ruth Miller, Lois Moran, Baby Marie Osborne, Muriel Ostriche, Eddie Quillan, Esther Ralston, Dorothy Revier, David Rollins and Gladys Walton.
About the Author Michael G. Ankerich is a writer whose work focuses on the silent film era of Hollywood. A former newspaper reporter, he has written extensively for Classic Images, Films of the Golden Age, and Hollywood Studio Magazine, which featured his interview with Butterfly McQueen (Prissy) on the 50th anniversary of the release of Gone With The Wind.
Book is 319 pages, McFarland. Available from amazon.com
New Busby Berkeley book
Maybe the most revered of musical directors was the extreme-stylist of the golden era of Hollywood movies, Busby Berkeley, a man who changed what a stage-production meant on film by taking the camera and making it move like a winged-eye that could see the motion of actors from every angle. Whether they were underwater, behind glass, or below a skyward lense, Berkeley made synchronized motion more than a filmed reproduction of a Broadway play.
Book is by Jeffrey Spivak, 408 pages, University Press of Kentucky. Available from amazon.com