Customer Reviews

The Complete Films Of Audrey Hepburn (Citadel Film)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I would like to give the author credit for a good job at compiling all her films with descriptive categories and contemporaneous critical reviews, both favorable and not so favorable. Just for that effort this book is worthwile to buy. It has a biography of her which may be too long for an introduction or too short for a full biography. I get the impression that the author wanted to portray to the reader a summary of her life through the films compiled here, as obectively as possible. There are other books if one is interest in a complete biography. This is a good compilation of her work.

There are some pictures not seen in other publications. Especially I would like to mention pictures from "How to steal a million" and "Two for the Road". They are the best of her Mod-ish look. Especially, the one on pp. 188 that shows her face half in the dark is a superb piece of art. Also, it includes beautiful images of her with a dark coat and a beret from the last scenes of the much overlooked film "The Children's Hour."

One complaint about this book is the poor quality of its binding. Already pages are coming loose. It should have been hard-bound. But still this is the ony compilation of her films.

This is one of the better "Films of" entries in the Citadel collection. It also---for some unknown reason----one of the hardest to find. The narrative comments are clear and helpful, and the photos are wonderful. In these books, the reader should not be seeking a library-quality biographical review of the subject. But this book certainly is a worthy addition for a serious moviegoer to own.

One expected the text to be trite. Vermalye is obviously oneof those professional hacks with no feeling, love or understanding fortheir subjects beyond spouting received truisms.

It begins with a brief overview of her career, offering no insight into why Audrey was perhaps the most wonderful actress of them all. We're so consistently reminded of her 'grace' and 'kindness' that we forget that she was an actual human being, and that her particular genius lay in the disparity between her ineffable chic and mischievous charm on the surface, and the profound sadness and disillusion (which ironised her so-called vulnerability)hidden in her eyes.

He fails to put her persona into any kind of meaningful cultural context - he doesn't define her persona at all; her modernity, her status as an almost abstract icon (in films like Charade and Funny Face, her very chiselled beauty becomes enmeshed with the sharp formality of the film's mise-en-scene to create a complex, anti-naturalistic evocation of desire, last seen in the Dietrich/Von Sternberg films) are all ignored in favour of fluffy Victoriana.

As I said, one expected the text to be trite: after all, one buys these books for the photographs. And these are magnificent, detailing Audrey from every point of her career, and her early life, some I've never seen before. They reveal her at work, in wonderfully disarming, relaxed attitudes. There are stunning stills from all her pictures, not all of them flattering, but always redolent of a real woman, not some angelic waif, and certainly making you yearn to watch those amazing films again.