Michael Newton teaches 19th-century literature at Leiden University.
Montgomery Clift was a lush, a loser and a masochist; for more than 15 years he was also one of the finest actors in America – as Clark Gable put it, ‘that faggot is a hell of an actor.’ His beauty, his drinking, his homosexuality, his failure and his unaccountable talent have all re-formed themselves as elements of the icon that stands in for Clift, a potent image of the...
Most reviewers thought Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona was a fabulous return to form. The film even won the director a belated Oscar. I found it hard to reconcile the general praise with my own sense that the movie represented the most catastrophic artistic collapse since Ben Jonson’s ‘dotages’. That sense has been confirmed by Allen’s new film, Whatever Works. I wanted to love it, because I have loved so many Woody Allen films. But as in VCB, the characters are reduced to crude sketches of embodied attitudes, resembling no human being who ever lived or ever will. One of them is a ‘romantic’: we know this a) because he lives on a houseboat and b) because on several occasions he tells someone so.
Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it –...
To make things clear, yes, Me Cheeta: The Autobiography is a celebrity memoir, to shelve alongside such classics as Mickey Rooney’s Life Is Too Short and Katharine Hepburn’s modestly entitled Me. The putative author is indeed Cheeta, the superannuated chimpanzee star of just short of a dozen Tarzan movies and the sidekick of American beefcake Johnny Weissmuller. Cheeta opens the story of his life by saying it will be a celebratory list, an expanded acknowledgments page. As it happens, the book works out rather differently.
One day Ava Gardner dropped by the studio publicity department at MGM. She wanted to take a look at all those cheesecake photos they were always taking of her: throwing a beach-ball; licking an ice-cream cone. A drawer full of images was spread out before her. After a little while, according to Lee Server’s new biography, she ‘kind of shrugged, and she said: “Jeez...
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