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FROM DOORSTOPS TO STOCKING FILLERS
QUENTIN FALK REVIEWS A DOZEN BOOKS JUST PERFECT FOR CHRISTMAS PRESENTS
FROM DOORSTOPS TO STOCKING FILLERS
Christmas Bookshelf Reviews
UP IN THE CLOUDS, GENTLEMEN
PLEASE
BY
SIR JOHN MILLS (ORION, £7.99)
Britain’s old-
est practis-
ing thespi-
an – 93 and still
going strong – provides a timely
update to his memoirs which originally ended in 1980. The last 20 years have seen him tackle everything from Madonna to Mr Bean not to mention a continuing one-man stage show and even a role just last year in the video version of Cats.
STARRING SHERLOCK HOLMES
BY
DAVID
STUART
DAVIES (TITAN, £29.99)
Regular
cited as
the character most often por-
trayed on camera since the inception of the story film, the Great Detective gets five star treatment here in the best-illus- trated survey yet of a big and small screen career which has lasted more than a century. Hail Rathbone, Cushing and Brett among hundreds of sleuthing imper- sonators.
MCQUEEN: THE BIOGRAPHY
BY CHRISTOPHER
SANDFORD (HARPERCOLLINS, £16.99)
Icon” is perhaps
the most
overused word
in the lexicon of
stardom but it
perfectly fits this
complex actor
who still, two full decades after his
death aged 50, epitomises timeless Cool. Despite that enduring badge of merit, he’s someone, according to this catalogue of excess, whose “vanity and narcissism cur- dled into megalomania.”
THE GREATEST SCI-FI FILMS NEVER MADE
BY DAVID HUGHES (TITAN, £18.99)
James Cameron’s
Spider-Man and
Kevin Smith’s The
Six Million Dollar
Man. Or, for that
matter, movie ver-
sions of
Thunderbirds, The
Silver Surfer and The Hitchhiker’s
Guide To The Galaxy. A crackingly well- documented What If? of famous science- fiction film projects that for the most part still remain doggedly in development hell.
ROBERT MITCHUM: ‘BABY, I DON’T CARE’
BY LEE SERVER (FABER, £20)
The subtitle deftly
says it all about
the lizard-lid-
ded Hollywood star
who turned sleep-
walking into an art
form. He could
barely contain his
contempt for the
film profession
yet made more
than 120 movies, a
handful of them great such as Out Of The Past, The Night Of The Hunter and Cape Fear.
DIGITAL DOMAIN: THE LEADING EDGE OF SPECIAL EFFECTS
BY PIERS
BIZONY (AURUM PRESS, £35)
The visual
effects
compa-
ny, formed
by James
Cameron, Stan Winston and
Scott Ross, was officially launched in 1993 and has since weaved its sfx magic on filmslikeTrueLies,Titanic,Apollo13, The Fifth Element, Armageddon, X-Men and The Grinch. Its remarkable art is cele- brated and many secrets shared in this suitably lavish volume.
CARY GRANT: IN NAME ONLY BY GARY MORECAMBE &
MARTIN STERLING (ROBSON, £16.95)
What
impressed
me most
about Douglas
Fairbanks was his
tan,” the Bristol-
born actor once
recalled. “I decid-
ed then that hav-
ing a tan made you look good, no mat-
ter how you felt underneath. I always kept a tan after that.” That’s about as startling as it gets in this good-natured celebration of the stylish star.
STAN AND OLLIE:
THE ROOTS OF COMEDY
BY SIMON LOUVISH (FABER, £25)
After his books
on WC Fields
and The Marx
Brothers, the
author turns an
equally well-
trained spotlight
on Laurel &
Hardy, “the most
successful come-
dy team of all
time,” whose separate lives in
vaudeville and silents finally converged in the 1921 two-reeler, The Lucky Dog. But it would be another six years before the tan- dem was officially launched.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL
BY JOAN PLOWRIGHT (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20)
This doyenne
of stage and
screen gives
a touching
account of what
it was like to be
‘the other
woman’ in the
turbulent fall-
out from per-
haps the most famous show- bizmarriageofthemall. Muchhas already been written about Leigh and Olivier so this belated insight is partic- ularly fascinating.
THE JAWS LOG
BY CARL GOTTLIEB (FABER, £12.99)
Steven Spielberg
was a beard-
less boy won-
der of 26 when he
created what
became
Hollywood’s first
Summer
Blockbuster.
Penned at the
time by one of
its screenwriters
(and sixth-on-the-credits actor), this remains one of the best ever Making Of... memoirs given an extra boost by the addi- tion of revealing Endnotes 25 years on.
MARLON BRANDO
BY PATRICIA BOSWORTH (WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, £12.99)
an there pos- sibly be any-
thing new to
say about, yes,
another icon,
who though
now old and
bloated
remains as
watchable as
ever? Maybe
not, but how
about this excuse for cue
cards: “Real people don’t know what they’re going to say. Their words often come as a surprise. That’s the way it should be in a movie.”
ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL: INCOGNITO
INTRODUCTION BY
BILLY BOB THORNTON
(ARENA, £36)
Antonin Kratochvil,
internationally
acknowledged
photo journalist, turns from war to celebri- ties in Incognito, recording his subjects in a way that will shock some professionals. Text is minimal, all in stark monochrome with an edgy nervousness captured at slowspeedandasBillyBobThornton states, “he photographed me when I was sick, both mentally and emotionally, when I was full of joy and when I didn’t give a damn: it shows.”
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