Reading Histories and Biographies Part Two: Film Biographies

I am especially very fond of reading biographies of those who work in film and the theatre. Here the frequent difficulty of the biographer is balancing coverage of the life and work. And, since Hollywood employed press agents who floated false stories about a studio's stars, some biographies have been prone to pick up the hype and the rumors.

Years ago, I tried to write a biographical/film analysis piece on spec for Films in Review on the actor Jack Palance. Palance had been a boxer, served in the Air Force, and worked in coal minds before he became an actor. He is best known now for Shane (1953) and City Slickers (1991), for which he won the Academy Award. In the piece, I dutifully picked up what I had read in Current Biography that his battered face was the result of burns he suffered when bailing out of a burning B-42 Liberator bomber during World War Two and his subsequent reconstructive surgery. I sent the piece to Palance's agent and asked for an interview. I didn't get an interview, and the piece was never published. But I did get a typed note from Palance that read, "You [knucklehead], if I had plastic surgery, don't you think they'd have done a better job!" The story was probably made up by a studio press agent, Palance's face was likely the result of boxing and other factors, and, by the way, he didn't say knucklehead.

More recent film biographies have employed more extensive research, with mixed results.

Richard Zoglin's 2014 biography of the actor and comedian Bob Hope, titled Hope: Entertainer of the Century (2014), has as its unique focus the numerous affairs of this man publicly known as a devoted husband, family man, and selfless entertainer of U.S. troops. Zoglin also dutifully discusses Hope's television shows and the movies, but he makes any critical analysis brief. 

James Kaplan's 2016 Sinatra: The Chairman is the author's second part of his two-part biography of the singer and movie star Frank Sinatra. Part One, Frank: The Voice (2011), covered his life from his birth in 1915 to his winning the Academy Award in 1954. The Chairman runs from 1954 to Sinatra's death in 1998. Kaplan provides incredible detail on Sinatra's recording sessions and on his love affairs. He also offers critical analysis of each film, but usually in a paragraph or less. An additional problem is, having spent 800 pages discussing the first 39 years of his life, Kaplan spends 850 pages on Sinatra's life from 1954 to 1971 when he retired, and only 140 pages on his life from his comeback in 1973 to his 1998 death. Kaplan's explanation is that Sinatra's recording output shrank during these years, his number of affairs shriveled, and, as an actor, he made just two movies. It was, he said, a different life. But, especially because of the heft of both books, which sometimes cover periods of Sinatra's life day by day or week by week, the cursory treatment of the last 22 years of Sinatra's life stands out and indicates a feeling that Sinatra's touring, singing concerts with the same songs in the same way, wasn't worry of serious consideration.

Conversely, in John Wayne: The Life and Legend (2015), Scott Eyman spends just 101 pages on Wayne's life from his birth in 1907 through his early film career to his breakout role in Stagecoach (1939); 250 pages on the years from 1940 to 1961 when his film career was at its highest, and 200 pages from 1961  to Wayne's death in 1979, during which time Eyman knew Wayne. The last part is the most detailed. The author also relied on interviews with those who worked with Wayne or their children. But there were clearly fewer people around who remembered the earlier films. The description of these films is spotty and the analysis perfunctory, with many of them (such as 'Neath the Arizona Skies) not mentioned. However, for  the films of the middle and later periods, the descriptions and analyses are lengthier and very detailed, especially for the more famous films.

Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson's biography of the actor, singer, and dancer Gene Kelly--He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (2017) is dutiful in covering both his life and work, but its analysis of his films is brief and superficial, often relying on box office performances or critics' reviews to indicate whether or not a film was successful. And Kelly's films have been addressed in many other books, including biographies and autobiographies or his co-stars and books on the Hollywood musical.

Marc Eliot's Charlton Heston: The Last Icon (2017) has the disadvantage of following the film and stage actor's own autobiography and his published diaries. It generally adds little to what Heston himself wrote, and its film analysis is very cursory, sometimes limited to a reporting of box office receipts. I even wondered if he had seen some of Heston's films (or seen them recently) because he sometimes gets the plots wrong. For example, he writes that The War Lord (1965), which was one of my favorite films from my youth, dealing with the Medieval custom of  droit du seigneur, ends with the Norman duke dying in the arms of the young woman he has taken from her husband and with whom he has fallen in love. The movie really ends with the wounded duke leaving the woman behind and riding to find his king and ask for forgiveness. Eliot states that in the 1968 film Counterpoint, Heston's co-star Maximilian Schell, who plays a Nazi officer, repeats his performance of a Nazi from the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg. However, Schell didn't play a Nazi in the earlier film but rather an attorney for a judge accused of Nazi war crimes. 

What Eliot does give the reader is a reporting of the portion of Heston's life that he didn't write about, the period from 1995 to his death in 2008, during which he became president of the National Rifle Association and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. Eliot describes how Heston was the first chairman of the American Film Institute from 1971 to 1982 and lent his gravitas to this new film association. But, according to Eliot,  Heston never received the AFI's Life Achievement Award because the association's more liberal members could not bring themselves to approve an award to a man of conservative politics and who was a spokesman for the NRA from 1998 to 2003. This was in spite of the fact that Heston was a creator of the AFI and that it probably wouldn't have existed without his efforts.. If for no other reason, Eliot's book deserves to be read for its ending.

Copyright 2018 by John T. Aquino