Family Values

Michael Wood, 17 October 1996

The Last Don 
by Mario Puzo.
Heinemann, 482 pp., £15.99, October 1996, 0 434 60498 4
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... so compelling, so remote from the slightly mawkish moments in the first, where that lovable old Marlon Brando collapses to his death while playing with a grandchild in the garden, is the sense of deeper and deeper implication in horror. Godfather III (1990) is a different story altogether, a wandering tale of conspiracy and disaster, a movie which is ...

Whangity-Whang-Whang

Ian Hamilton, 28 May 1992

Damon Runyon: A Life 
by Jimmy Breslin.
Hodder, 410 pp., £17.99, March 1992, 0 340 57034 2
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... Runyon would later base one of his most dreamy-eyed character-confections, ‘The Sky’ – or Marlon Brando in the film of Guys and Dolls. Sky Masterson is Runyon’s fugitive ideal. As a sportswriter, and as a close-up hanger-on of gangsters and tycoons, Runyon was in the business of constructing heroes, but none of the heavyweight boxers he ...

Irishness is for other people

Terry Eagleton: Enrique Vila-Matas, 19 July 2012

Dublinesque 
by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey.
Harvill Secker, 245 pp., £16.99, June 2012, 978 1 84655 489 6
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... at times uncertain. Mysteriously, he confuses literature with Catherine Deneuve, and suspects that Marlon Brando died in his place. Unhinged from the workaday world in the manner of Stephen Dedalus, yet given to free association in the style of Leopold Bloom, he sets out from his native Barcelona on a trip to Ireland in search of his long-buried self. His ...

Martinique in Burbank

David Thomson: Bogart and Bacall, 19 October 2023

Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 634 pp., £35, August, 978 0 06 302639 1
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... in writing about the film business (he has produced good books on Katharine Hepburn and Marlon Brando in the past). He does his best to like Bogart and Bacall, though he seems a little perplexed by the discovery that they were difficult people, even pains in the neck. Who knows how many readers will care now about their curious, brief ...

Little Lame Balloonman

August Kleinzahler: E.E. Cummings, 9 October 2014

E.E. Cummings: The Complete Poems, 1904-62 
edited by George James Firmage.
Liveright, 1102 pp., £36, September 2013, 978 0 87140 710 8
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E.E. Cummings: A Life 
by Susan Cheever.
Pantheon, 209 pp., £16, February 2014, 978 0 307 37997 9
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... Allen Tate and Djuna Barnes, who also lived on Patchin Place, as Theodore Dreiser once had and Marlon Brando later would. He had become well regarded as an experimental poet, but he hadn’t yet become famous. Then, in 1931, he visited the USSR and was horrified by what he saw. His disenchantment with communism and frankness about it was not well ...

A Little Holiday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ben Hecht’s Cause, 23 September 2021

A Child of the Century 
by Ben Hecht.
Yale, 654 pp., £16, April 2020, 978 0 300 25179 1
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Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures 
by Adina Hoffman.
Yale, 245 pp., £10.99, April 2020, 978 0 300 25181 4
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... play A Flag Is Born, which opened on Broadway in 1946 with a cast including Paul Muni and Marlon Brando. After the United Nations proposed the partition of Palestine in late 1947, the Attlee government decided to leave the inhabitants to find a solution. In a bitter war, the Zionists – Israelis once the state was proclaimed in May 1948 ...

Strange Stardom

David Haglund: James Franco, 17 March 2011

Palo Alto: Stories 
by James Franco.
Faber, 197 pp., £12.99, January 2011, 978 0 571 27316 4
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... Dean,’ Franco says, ‘I’m James Dean. Actors sniff jackets. Actors act, actors sniff jackets. Marlon Brando sniffed jackets.’ Franco tore himself down in more serious ways as well. In July 2008, he filmed Erased James Franco (the title is a nod to Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning) with the artist Carter, whose previous work consisted largely of ...

How to Speak Zazie

Dennis Duncan: Translating Raymond Queneau, 20 June 2024

The Skin of Dreams 
by Raymond Queneau, translated by Chris Clarke.
NYRB, 203 pp., $16.95, January, 978 1 68137 770 4
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... Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home on his motorbike. ‘Si tu t’imagines,’ indeed.But the song isn’t a wish-upon-a-star fantasy. ‘Imagine’, here, is used in its finger-wagging, admonitory sense: you’ve got another think ...

Ghost Ions

Jonathan Coe: AA-Rated Memories, 18 August 2022

Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems 
edited by Julian Upton.
Headpress, 595 pp., £22.99, April, 978 1 909394 93 3
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The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window 
by Rob Young.
Faber, 500 pp., £12.99, August, 978 0 571 28460 3
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... to The Nightcomers (1971), a characteristically lurid offering from Michael Winner in which Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beacham take on the roles of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in a sleazy, sex-filled prequel to James’s novella. Young rightly devotes several pages to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, but Offbeat passes over it as being too well ...

Diary

Peter Pomerantsev: At Potemkin Productions, 3 February 2011

... scene reminded me of, then I realised: it’s taken straight from the moment in The Godfather when Marlon Brando gathers the heads of the New York clans to discuss business. Tarantino repeats the device when Lucy Liu meets the Yakuza heads in Kill Bill – it’s a trope in gangster movies. I doubt this is coincidence. Putin’s PR men dress him like a ...

The Tarnished Age

Richard Mayne, 3 September 1981

David O. Selznick’s Hollywood 
by Ronald Haver.
Secker, 425 pp., £35, December 1980, 0 436 19128 8
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My Early life 
by Ronald Reagan and Richard Hubler.
Sidgwick, 316 pp., £7.95, April 1981, 0 283 98771 5
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Naming Names 
by Victor Navasky.
Viking, 482 pp., $15.95, October 1980, 0 670 50393 2
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... On the Waterfront, where union corruption is only defeated after Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, plucks up the courage to ... fink. Navasky pours scorn on this movie, as if sensing how much it damages his case. There’s little point in enumerating some of the minor errors in Naming Names: its omission of Philip Dunne, who helped found ...

Brief Encounters

Andrew O’Hagan: Gielgud and Redgrave, 5 August 2004

Gielgud's Letters 
edited by Richard Mangan.
Weidenfeld, 564 pp., £20, March 2004, 0 297 82989 0
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Secret Dreams: A Biography of Michael Redgrave 
by Alan Strachan.
Weidenfeld, 484 pp., £25, April 2004, 0 297 60764 2
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... to fend for themselves. Gielgud was never out of work, unlike his Julius Caesar co-star the late Marlon Brando, who made a fabulous cult of his non-appearance on stage, and whose indolence and contempt for the business causes Gielgud to look like a worker bee, making regular honey at no great expense to the spirit. ...

Where could I emote?

Bee Wilson: Looking for Al Pacino, 26 June 2025

Sonny Boy: A Memoir 
by Al Pacino.
Century, 369 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 5299 1262 3
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... one of the constants of Pacino’s life and may well have been more important to him than cinema. Marlon Brando (his co-star in The Godfather) apparently once said that he would make the ideal Shylock. ‘How Marlon saw that in me, I’ll never know,’ Pacino notes in his memoir, Sonny Boy, skilfully co-written with ...

On Trying to Be Portugal

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Zionist Terrorism, 6 August 2009

‘A Senseless, Squalid War’: Voices from Palestine 1945-48 
by Norman Rose.
Bodley Head, 278 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 224 07938 9
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Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism 1945-48 
by David Cesarani.
Heinemann, 290 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 434 01844 4
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... in tone, written by Ben Hecht, an ardent Irgun supporter, and starring the 22-year-old Marlon Brando. A quainter showbiz connection came when American arms were secretly acquired for the incipient Jewish state and smuggled out by Teddy Kollek, later mayor of Jerusalem, with the help of Meyer Lansky, the mobster whose associates controlled the ...

Reviewers

Marilyn Butler, 22 January 1981

Three-Quarter Face 
by Penelope Gilliatt.
Secker, 295 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 9780436179587
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Show People 
by Kenneth Tynan.
Weidenfeld, 317 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 297 77842 0
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When the lights go down 
by Pauline Kael.
Boyars, 592 pp., £8.95, August 1980, 0 7145 2726 2
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... in Tynan’s work as in Gilliatt’s. She writes of the film persona of Burt Lancaster or Marlon Brando or Sean Connery, all actors she likes to watch, as though these are nevertheless people we all know, and don’t have to fawn on. She never suggests she has any privileged knowledge of them off the screen, and what emerges of her ...