Customer Reviews

Louise Brooks

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am one of those who became entranced by Louise Brooks after seeing her in "Pandora's Box". She appeared to be highly sexual, intelligent, and to be marching to the sound of a drummer that she alone heard within herself. It turns out that she was all of this. This is an excellent biography and a lesson about what happens to those who despise the opportunities that life presents to us and to those whose lives are driven by sex rather than common sense. Louise Brooks was a very modern woman despite having been a star of the silent screen. She made only a few films but her performances in those films stand up with the great performances of today and their naturalism makes the acting of most silent screen starlets seem idiotic. While other actresses were concerned with nothing but their looks, Brooks was reading Shaw and Proust. While others did all they could to ingratiate themselves with the movie studios, Brooks had nothing but indifference for them. She turned her back on fame, fortune, and power. She could have had a brilliant career but always sabotaged her chances. She had beauty and incredible sex appeal. She had Chaplin as a lover. She wrote. She lives on today as an image of a woman ahead of her time and also as a tragic waste. Her own difficult personality drove everyone away. Her lack of discipline was childish. She fascinates. This is the best biography we will ever get of her. Recommended.

This book was wonderful, before I read it I had no idea in the world who Louise Brooks was or what an impression she had on the motion picture industry. While this book is full of information and well written there are some slow points. A wonderful book for anyone interested in films.

Louise Brooks by Barry Paris is the only full-length biography on silent screen legend Louise Brooks to date. Paris' career as a successful journalist serves him well in his role of biographer; his talent for in-depth research paired with stylish writing makes for exciting and highly-informative reading, and creates a book that will stand as the definitive biography in the face of any others that may follow.

In Louise Brooks, Paris carefully traces the actress' childhood in Cherryvale, Kansas - the events of which would have a profound influence on the woman she was to become. Her early stage career in New York and her film career in both Hollywood and Berlin are covered fully from both a professional and a personal viewpoint. Weaving Brooks' own reflections as well as countless interviews with contemporaries, Paris gives a well-rounded impression of a complex character. Brooks' sad decline is handled with sensitivity but also full disclosure, and her joyous, phoenix-like uprising in her later years serves for a real-life happy ending.

The book itself is nicely presented and a pleasure to hold - both in hardcover and in paperback - and is written in an easy-to-read font. A substantial book at 608 pages, it is illustrated throughout with black & white photos as well as an 8-page portrait gallery insert.

In a genre where dross is often offered as gold, Louise Brooks by Barry Paris is an intelligent, top-of-the-line masterwork - the very best in biography. Read it - you will not be disappointed!

Although it seems like I've always known who Louise Brooks was--that beautiful face encased in a glossy, black helmet of perfectly coiffed and timelessly stylish hair, which I'd seen in books and magazines--I now realize I knew next to nothing about this strangely compelling actress before reading Barry Paris's outstanding biography. I knew, of course, that she was a silent screen star but I'd only seen her in Pandora's Box, which I caught on TV many years ago, without really knowing just how significant a film it was. This book brings Brooks to life in a remarkably detailed and, mostly, evenhanded way, revealing a woman of extreme wilfulness, self-destructive tendencies, and nastiness, yet gifted with a magnetic personality, unforgettable beauty, and unusual intellectual curiousity. By her early twenties, Brooks had already been the lover of many powerful men, and had made a series of mostly second-rate films in which she played secondary roles but always managed to stand out because of her looks. Her greatest claim to cinema fame was in Pabst's Pandora's Box, made in Germany after she walked out on Hollywood, but a major failure in its day; it took almost a quarter of a century before it was rediscovered by cineastes and given masterpiece status. By then, Brooks, a compulsive drinker, sensualist, and smoker, had whittled much of her standing away, eventually becoming a bitter, hag-like recluse in a tiny Rochester, NY, apartment. She evolved into an excellent writer, but her output, like that of her films, was small. When she became a cult figure in her later life, and had the opportunity to profit substantially by it, she quickly lost interest and retired to the security of her apartment, turning on any journalist or scholar she thought was only interested in her so they could make money from their relationship. Only the secret subsidies of William Paley of CBS, her former lover (whom she barely ever saw over the past three decades of her life), allowed her enough to live on. Paris gives us a fabulously well-researched look at this woman's life, her loves, her acting, her writing, her friendships, her family, and her erratic personality. He also sometimes leans too heavily on hyperbole when extolling her gifts as a performer, which can now, over twenty years since the book was written, be easily checked by watching the many clips of her available on YouTube. One can also, thankfully, see her in her old age being interviewed by film specialists, and hear her rich but somewhat stagy voice, a throwback to the elocutionary standards of the early 30s, when film stars had to learn to speak dialogue--although she made barely any sound movies. What stands out most is, as always, her appearance. No other film star of her era looks less dated. There is something about her face, with its large, soulful eyes and their odd little, widely spaced eyebrows, that makes her seem as chic as any of today's stars; her unusual hairstyle, worn over and over in her films, regardless of the role, establishes her appearance as iconic. Her acting has been extolled by modern critics as brilliant, but i suggest that readers view the clips for themselves and then consider if she was as "great" an actress as some have claimed. On the other hand, as a screen presence, she seems much more imbued with "It" than her more successful and popular contemporary, Clara Bow, the "It Girl." Who would want to see the old-fashioned faces and hairdos of Colleen Moore, Gloria Swanson, or Clara Bow when they can gaze in rapture at the sleek epitome of flapperdom represented by the irresistable Louise Brooks? The tragedy is that neither she nor her producers knew her potential; millions of film fans have been the poorer for it ever since.

This Bio does not look upon Louise Brooks as sympathetically as other's Bio's do. Here we feel that we are being told the truth - as not everything in her life was perfect, or admirable, or even sympathetic. Louise Brooks was still a person who did things her way. And this books tells us what her was. A wonderful look at a wonderful Actress, Dancer and Writer.

An all-emcompassing book for fans of Louise Brooks. It has interesting stories and beautiful photos.

This is a great biography of an obscure, but fascinating silent film star. Barry Paris has done a great job researching the life and times of Louise Brooks. A must-read for any Brooks fan.