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Richard Schickel Brando: A Life in Our Times
Atheneum 1991-08 0689121083 / 9780689121081 Hardcover Used: Good Used: Good Hardcover
This hardcover book is the second printing of the first edition published in 1991 by Atheneum with 256 pages including photographs and prelims. The text is unmarked. The binding is sound though the hinges are weakening. The dust jacket is unclipped and untorn but has some creasing along the edges. Previous owners bookplate is fastened to the front pastedown. The spine is slightly slanted. Brando brooding. It was a sight never before seen in the movies. In films like A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild Ones, On the Waterfront he redefined the nature of screen heroism, redefined the standards of screen acting and helped the entire postwar generaÂtion to define itself. In the process he became something more than a star; he became a cultural icon, one of those rare figures whose public life permanently invades and, in some measure, shapes our private reveries.A distinguished critic recalling. Richard Schickel is a member of that generation that came of age as Marlon Brando entered his first claims on the world's attention. In this book he re-creates the excitement, the danÂger, the controversy of the years when Marlon Brando challenged, and overturned, everyÂone's ideas of how a movie star's life should be lived. More than that, Richard Schickel reÂcreates the era in which Brando came of age: Hollywood in crisis, America addled by anxious prosperity and Gold War conformiÂties, and an alien culture—youth—forming within the larger one.A life that is more than a "life." Marlon Brando was the product of an archetypical American adolescence—at once rebellious and dutiful. In his young manhood he knew fame and achievement as everyone dreams of it—vast, sudden, overwhelming. In maturity he alternately despised and embraced his own gifts and the gifts the world insisted on pressing upon him. In age, his life has been touched by tragedy. In tracing this life, as notable for its enigmas and its refusals as it is for its ambiguous triumphs, Richard Schickel has provided the first serious, deeply considÂered analysis of all of Marlon Brando's movÂies, offering fresh and often surprising judgÂments on his work and the conditions under which it was performed.Writing in a unique tone, at once intimate and ironic, drawing on his remarkable sense of film and social history, Richard Schickel sets the movies firmly within the context of their times. More important, he also places the troubled, troubling life of his subject in the context of our lives, showing how Brando has reflected and refracted the hopes of his own theatrical generation, influenced the asÂpirations of those who have followed him, helped determine the relationship of celebriÂties to their own fame, and, above all, defined his public's relationship with the movies, with stardom, and with the life of the times they have shared with Marlon Brando.Richard Schickel has reviewed movies for Time magazine since 1972; before that he was Life's film critic. He is the author of many books, notably The Disney Version, His Picture in the Papers, D.W, Griffith: An American Life, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, and Schickel on Film, a collection of essays. Recently he wrote the texts for two photographic books, Striking Poses and Hollywood at Home. His critical-biographical study of Marlon Brando compleÂments similar volumes on Gary Grant and James Gagney. He is working on a book about American movies during World War TWo. Mr. Schickel has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and has won the British Film Institute book prize. He is also a writer-director of television documentaries, which he produces in collabÂoration with his wife, Carol Rubinstein.From Publishers WeeklyIn this highly sympathetic examination of the acting career of Marlon Brando, Time movie critic Schickel repeatedly refers to what he calls "the illimitable promise of Brando's youth," as demonstrated by his roles in A Streetcar Named Desire , The Wild One and On the Waterfront . For the author's generation, which "came of age in the years immediately after the Second World War," Brando represented "something of what we aspired to be: rude and sensitive, inarticulate but painfully aware--living oxymorons, if you will." Refreshingly spare about the actor's tangled personal life, Schickel, however, is at pains to defend Brando's disappointing career since the '50s. The tone is set at the beginning of the book in an unctuous open letter to Brando ("I've often wondered, did you read Camus, too?") and leads Schickel to ridicule Truman Capote for his revealing 1957 profile of Brando as well as the New Yorker for publishing it. Only when considering Brando's "work" in the '80s does Schickel come to the conclusion that many reached years earlier: Brando's appearances had become "edged by contempt for both his craft and his public." Photos not seen by PW . Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalMany biographies of Marlon Brando have already been published (e.g., Gary Carey's Marlon Brando: The Only Contender , St. Martin's, 1985; Christopher Nickens's Brando: A Biography in Photographs , Doubleday, 1987), some written by sometime friends of Brando and others by biographers intent on detail and anecdote. As one might guess from the subtitle of his book, Schickel, senior movie reviewer for Time magazine and author of Disney Version ( LJ 4/15/68) and The Men Who Made the Movies ( LJ 6/1/75), attempts to paint a broader picture. He provides the outlines of Brando's life, but his primary concern is the reason much of a generation idolized and identified with Brando. Occasionally his philosophizing gets turgid, but Schickel is basically an intelligent and insightful writer. Recommended.- John Smothers, Mon mouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. Brando brooding. It was a sight never before seen in the movies. In films like A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild Ones, On the Waterfront he redefined the nature of screen heroism, redefined the standards of screen acting and helped the entire postwar generaÂtion to define itself. In the process he became something more than a star; he became a cultural icon, one of those rare figures whose public life permanently invades and, in some measure, shapes our private reveries.A distinguished critic recalling. Richard Schickel is a member of that generation that came of age as Marlon Brando entered his first claims on the world's attention. In this book he re-creates the excitement, the danÂger, the controversy of the years when Marlon Brando challenged, and overturned, everyÂone's ideas of how a movie star's life should be lived. More than that, Richard Schickel reÂcreates the era in which Brando came of age: Hollywood in crisis, America addled by anxious prosperity and Gold War conformiÂties, and an alien culture—youth—forming within the larger one.A life that is more than a "life." Marlon Brando was the product of an archetypical American adolescence—at once rebellious and dutiful. In his young manhood he knew fame and achievement as everyone dreams of it—vast, sudden, overwhelming. In maturity he alternately despised and embraced his own gifts and the gifts the world insisted on pressing upon him. In age, his life has been touched by tragedy. In tracing this life, as notable for its enigmas and its refusals as it is for its ambiguous triumphs, Richard Schickel has provided the first serious, deeply considÂered analysis of all of Marlon Brando's movÂies, offering fresh and often surprising judgÂments on his work and the conditions under which it was performed.Writing in a unique tone, at once intimate and ironic, drawing on his remarkable sense of film and social history, Richard Schickel sets the movies firmly within the context of their times. More important, he also places the troubled, troubling life of his subject in the context of our lives, showing how Brando has reflected and refracted the hopes of his own theatrical generation, influenced the asÂpirations of those who have followed him, helped determine the relationship of celebriÂties to their own fame, and, above all, defined his public's relationship with the movies, with stardom, and with the life of the times they have shared with Marlon Brando.Richard Schickel has reviewed movies for Time magazine since 1972; before that he was Life's film critic. He is the author of many books, notably The Disney Version, His Picture in the Papers, D.W, Griffith: An American Life, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, and Schickel on Film, a collection of essays. Recently he wrote the texts for two photographic books, Striking Poses and Hollywood at Home. His critical-biographical study of Marlon Brando compleÂments similar volumes on Gary Grant and James Gagney. He is working on a book about American movies during World War TWo. Mr. Schickel has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and has won the British Film Institute book prize. He is also a writer-director of television documentaries, which he produces in collabÂoration with his wife, Carol Rubinstein.From Publishers WeeklyIn this highly sympathetic examination of the acting career of Marlon Brando, Time movie critic Schickel repeatedly refers to what he calls "the illimitable promise of Brando's youth," as demonstrated by his roles in A Streetcar Named Desire , The Wild One and On the Waterfront . For the author's generation, which "came of age in the years immediately after the Second World War," Brando represented "something of what we aspired to be: rude and sensitive, inarticulate but painfully aware--living oxymorons, if you will." Refreshingly spare about the actor's tangled personal life, Schickel, however, is at pains to defend Brando's disappointing career since the '50s. The tone is set at the beginning of the book in an unctuous open letter to Brando ("I've often wondered, did you read Camus, too?") and leads Schickel to ridicule Truman Capote for his revealing 1957 profile of Brando as well as the New Yorker for publishing it. Only when considering Brando's "work" in the '80s does Schickel come to the conclusion that many reached years earlier: Brando's appearances had become "edged by contempt for both his craft and his public." Photos not seen by PW . Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalMany biographies of Marlon Brando have already been published (e.g., Gary Carey's Marlon Brando: The Only Contender , St. Martin's, 1985; Christopher Nickens's Brando: A Biography in Photographs , Doubleday, 1987), some written by sometime friends of Brando and others by biographers intent on detail and anecdote. As one might guess from the subtitle of his book, Schickel, senior movie reviewer for Time magazine and author of Disney Version ( LJ 4/15/68) and The Men Who Made the Movies ( LJ 6/1/75), attempts to paint a broader picture. He provides the outlines of Brando's life, but his primary concern is the reason much of a generation idolized and identified with Brando. Occasionally his philosophizing gets turgid, but Schickel is basically an intelligent and insightful writer. Recommended.- John Smothers, Mon mouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Price:
6.95 USD
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