Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A "Silents Majority" review of "Dark Star", November 18, 1997
By A Customer
Autobiography's are sometimes a tough read simply because "Truth" can be colored to favor or sanitize the individual who writes about him or herself. Memoir's written by the children of the famous tread an even more precarious path. Bitter children can write damning or un-flattering portraits. Adoring children can sugarcoat the subject so much that your teeth hurt after reading each chapter. Dark Star, (St. Martin's Press, 1985), by Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, John Gilbert's daughter, has successfully become her father's biographer. She has objectively brought together the great and not-so-great moments and events of his life. Leatrice is the daughter of John Gilbert's first marriage to Leatrice Joy (the famous leading lady who followed in Gloria Swanson's fashionable footsteps as Cecil B. de Mille's perfect woman.) Ms. Fountain's research is impeccable regarding Gilbert's background and career. A detailed filmography and general index is included. Young Leatrice lost her beloved father when she was just blossoming into her adolescence. She felt compelled to piece together and solve the mystery of Gilbert the man and the artist. Her search becomes our search, her discoveries become our link with the man and his bittersweet life and legacy. For me, the discovery of this book redefined my devotion and interest in silent film entirely. The story of John Gilbert gave me a deeper passion to become an active participant in the preservation/revival movement of silent film. Dark Star is extraordinary and genuinely moving. Ms. Fountain's noble goal to connect one's perception to the complex person that this actor was, and to place John Gilbert as the premier romantic leading man of the glorious silent era has been accomplished.
- Copyright, 1997, Diane MacIntyre, "The Silents Majority"
|
|
|
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Dark Star" Is A Grand Tribute To A Grand Actor, September 13, 2003
The legendary John Gilbert is universally recognized as the most tragic figure in silent film history. His career was suddenly shot down via subterfuge while he basked in the sunshine of artistic success and unsurpassed popularity. A definitive biography of this icon of silent film had been long overdue when Leatrice Gilbert Fountain penned this splendid retelling of her Dad's glorious career. As all movie buffs know, John Gilbert was the "Great Lover of the Silent Screen," the successor to Wallace Reid and Rudolph Valentino. In fact, following Valantino's death, Gilbert reigned supreme as Hollywood's leading man from 1925 to 1929. It was in that fateful, latter year that the seemingly well-liked, easy-going Gilbert was done in by Louis B. Meyer, the autocratic head of MGM. It was in 1929 that Gilbert's life and career, like the stock market, came crashing down. Literally left standing at the alter by his real-life paramour Greta Garbo, the crestfallen Gilbert bumped into the tyrannical Meyer at King Vidor's and Eleanor Boardman's wedding reception(which was to have been a double ceremony with Gilbert and Garbo also tying the knot) and the mighty mouse mogul promptly advised Gilbert to "just go on screwing the dame---why marry her?" Gilbert responded with a right cross to the little dictator's chin, sending him sprawling on the ground. "I'll destroy you, Gilbert, if it costs me a million dollars," was Meyer's vindictive promise. Gilbert's first full-length talkie, "His Glorious Night," premiered later in 1929 and many insiders at the time believed that Meyer did indeed sabotage the screen idol's career by turning down the bass and maximizing the treble on the film's soundtrack. The result was devestating for Gilbert, who ordinarily had a light baritone similar to Ronald Coleman's or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. What should have come across as a pleasing if not deeply resonant voice sounded disturbingly high-pitched to an audience that quickly found humor in the incongruity between the virle Gilbert image and his seemingly Tiny Tim voice. Combined with stilted acting on the part of his co-star and the dated dialogue which made Gilbert appear as if he were reciting a heartfelt Elizabethan sonnet to a completely bored--even comatose--lover, the death knell was struck. A poor showing in an actor's talkie debut---even an actor as popular as Gilbert--- was a difficult blemish to erase. Voted the most popular actor in Hollywood in 1928, by the end of 1929 Gilbert's name was not even listed among the top one hundred. Thus began the decline into the abyss. Gilbert sank deeper and deeper into depression and alcoholism as Meyer, Thalberg (who promised to help his "friend", but never mustered the courage to stand up to the malignant dwarf Meyer), and the rest of MGM's greedy, self-interested big wigs refused to let Gilbert out of his contract while at the same time handing him the worst scripts on the lot. Gilbert was left without a career and without any self-esteem. Leatrice recalls how the defeated Gilbert arrived one morning at his MGM dressing room to find his belongings already removed and the star on his door replaced by that of a different actor. His final years were sad, and several comeback attempts (such as his starring role opposite Garbo in the 1933 period film "Queen Christina") failed to restore his once brilliant star. The new kids on the block like Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, and Clark Gable were now all the rage. A broken man, Gilbert died in 1936 at the tragically youthful age of 37. However, thanks to his daughter Leatrice's well-documented and haunting biography, her Dad's star shines again. The author paints a portrait of her father as a man and as an actor that is loving without sacrificing historical objectivity. Jack Gilbert had charisma, good looks, an amiable personality, and genuine acting ability. He was indeed one of a kind. It is a real shame that his life was destroyed by a coarse, unattractive, maniacal movie mogol who ruled his petty tyranny ... This is a great read. I recommend it with great fondness and enthusiasm.
|
|
|
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A loving honest biography, September 3, 2005
To date I've only seen a handful of Jack Gilbert movies, but I still count him as one of my favorite male actors, based not only on what little I've seen so far but also all of the wonderful things I've read about his great talent and what a wonderful nice kind person he was as well. This loving biography only confirms that Jack was a very talented capable performer and kind and giving in real life as well. Many biographies written by children of the stars go either one of two ways--nasty and vituperative, working out one's issues by attacking the parent, or overly candy-coated, unable to say a single bad word about the parent. Leatrice clearly adored her father, but that doesn't mean she's afraid to tell it like it is when need be. She's very up-front when writing about some of Jack's problems, like with keeping a marriage together and some of the problems he had with alcohol. Her parents split up a few months before she was born, but for various reasons Jack was never able to be really fully involved in his daughter's life until his final year, when Leatrice was ten and eleven years old. They really became close and bonded that year, after she sent him a fan letter and discovered that her daddy really loved her and had always been thinking about her, had long hoped she would contact and confide in him when she got older, might have been an absentee father physically but never emotionally (for example, one summer a few years before they began their loving father-daughter relationship, Jack saved Leatrice from drowning at the beach when she was swimming alone among some rough tides, out of sight of the other people on the shore).
Besides paying loving tribute to her father, Leatrice also wrote this book to set the record straight. For decades a lot of misinformation had been told and retold about her father's acting career and capabilities, particularly about why he fell from grace. The reasons for his plummet from being the top male romantic lead to someone who was put in very few quality talking pictures were many and complex, but mainly driven by how Louis B. Mayer had always hated Jack and really sabotaged his career. All of the stories about LBM really are true; he does not come across as a nice person in any of them, the way he never forgot a personal slight or things he interpreted as insults, even though they weren't even intended that way, sabotaging many careers because of this paranoia and quest for personal revenge. The real power at MGM, Irving Thalberg, was everything LBM wasn't--kind, gentle, generous, thoughtful, helpful, and most importantly a dear friend of Jack's, though unfortunately even he was eventually unable to save his career, and Leatrice believes he felt guilty about how he couldn't and didn't do more to help his friend and defend him against LBM when he had the chance. She delves into the reasons for her father's lackluster career in sound pictures with the same honesty and depth she does when discussing why her parents' marriage broke up and why they never got back together, even though they really did seem to love one another powerfully. Jack had a pleasant light baritone, even though many otherwise respectable books and film historians had repeated the lie about how he had a squeaky high-pitched whiny voice and was laughed offscreen after his talking debut, and thus driven into excessive alcholism and an early grave. People would repeat these stories and quote one another, without providing any solid evidence, and without even having seen that first full-length talkie, 'His Glorious Night,' to be in any valid position to say he had a whiny effeminate voice. Leatrice also discusses how her father was not the alcoholic of legend either; he did drink, sometimes heavily, but he wasn't the wasted alcoholic many people made him out to be either.
Besides setting the record straight on the real reasons behind her father's early grave and his freefall from grace at the box office, Leatrice also does a wonderful job at telling her father's early life story (as well as her mother's story). This was a true rags to riches story, with young Jack (then known as Cecil) growing up on the road, going from stage to stage with his mother and the other actors in their troupe, farmed out to various friends of his mother, sometimes treated quite badly, but never letting such bad times get to him or scar him. He also developed his lifelong love of the printed word and high culture during his childhood, becoming an intellectual bookworm who could never amass enough books. Jack was still a teenager when he began his acting career and working in itinerant jobs away from the stages he had grown up on, and at the time he entered films in 1915, acting was a very dangerous profession; as an extra he oftentimes literally risked his life. These were the days before unions, days off, adequate pay, and rest breaks, and in the absence of modern-day special effects, these actors and extras had to do all of their own stunts, even if they got seriously hurt. The death rate for actors was shockingly high in the Teens. But somehow he managed to rise above his early uncertain beginnings and became a leading man within only a few years of starting to act, as well as, for a time, also directing and writing, having been mentored by some of the leading lights of directors of those days, such as Thomas Ince and Maurice Tourneur. He was so much more complex than the rumors would suggest. My only minor complaint is that I wish the filmography in the back had been a little more detailed, such as noting who played whom and which of these films are lost. A few films she mentions in the main text as being lost, but it seems obvious, given the poor survival rates of silent films, particularly ones from before the Twenties, that a good deal of Jack's early films would be lost.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Marion Davies
by Matthew Kennedy
by André Soares
