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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must Read for Classic Film Fans,
This review is from: Dark Star: Meteoric Rise and Eclipse of John Gilbert (Hardcover)
John Gilbert was known as The Great Lover of the Silver Screen, although he didn't want to be typecast. But in fact, he was The Great Lover--and so much more. His best-known film, "The Big Parade," was the greatest box office hit until "Gone with the Wind." John Gilbert was versatile and humorous and could play a good guy or a bad guy equally with ease. Watch "Man, Woman and Sin" back to back with "Downstairs," and you'll see what I mean. Leatrice Gilbert Fountain's DARK STAR gives the reader an indepth portrait of her father, who, in spite of his human nature, was larger than life on screen and off. As her mother (actress Leatrice Joy) said, "He was Mercury. You'd touch him and he'd vanish." The most moving parts of the book involve Leatrice's relationship with her father, who died prematurely in his thirties after making a hundred films. He was her metaphorical prince in the tower. It's easy to give DARK STAR a five-star rating since the book is so well-written that I've read it five times.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well-written, absorbing, enlightening,
By
This review is from: Dark Star: Meteoric Rise and Eclipse of John Gilbert (Hardcover)
"Dark Star," a sympathetic but honest portrayal of the great silent film star, John Gilbert, written by his daughter, Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, brings to life an era well before the time of most readers, Hollywood in the days of silent films and early sound. Once and for all it reveals the truth about Jack Gilbert's rise and fall, more a result of the actor's integrity than any concoted myths about the suitability of his voice for "talkies." Ms. Fountain is now about 86 years old, and I'd love to tell her the special meaning her book has for me personally. My mother, Dorothy Pratt, was a lower-echelon MGM executive, head of the Reading Dept., a group of literate people who read books and synopsized them for producers, who didn't have time, or the desire (or ability?) to read whole books. She was hired about the time that Louis B. Mayer formed MGM and retired 30 years later, not long before his death. At some point in Jack Gilbert's tumultuous relationship with Greta Garbo, the legendary illustrator James Montgomery Flagg (famous for his WWI poster of Uncle Sam) drew an exotic portrait of Garbo for Gilbert. We can only guess that in one of the splits between the two stars the picture got thrown out a second-story window into a trash can. There it caught the eye of my father, a veteran WWI officer, whom Mom fell in love with, married, and gave a flunkie job at the studio. He retrieved the portrait. This year my brother had it beautifully framed. For us, the book fleshes out the whole story behind the drawing. Not just another old-Hollywood ego trip, it is a work of literary excellence.
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