Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors Review

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Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors ReviewNot quite up to the standard of his previous book on the famous directors he interviewed, it is nonetheless a charming complement and animated by the same quiet excitement. Bogdanovich is a great film director--when he wants to be--but not quite a great writer, and I found that while I could read three or four of these personality profiles in a row, that was my limit before they all started to blur. So it is a book to be savored not devoured.
It is produced on the patented Knopf film book model, everything luxe and overstuffed, with dozens of photo illustrations and an exquisute care about the presentation. I always think these Knopf books are like a film buff's pornography, for it's all about the pleasure of sinking into them. In this case, we get to glimpse close-up a handful of Hollywood's greatest stars, among them Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Tighter close-ups involve Bogdanovich's own directing of Audrey Hepburn (sad story), River Phoenix (sad too) and Boris Karloff, the first star in any of Bogdanovich's movies. This might have been sad, but Karloff emerges eerily in control of himself and his image.
The puzzling one is Sidney Poitier, and the story of his collaboration with PB on "To Sir With Love Part II" is one of those head0scratching stories. It might almost be fictional, a praody of Hollywood swallowing its own tail. You can't believe they made a sequel to the original TO SIR WITH LOVE, and then that it came and went without a single trace, except this scrap of memoir, is startling proof that sometimes we truly do cast our pearls before swine. Some buried Caesar indeed as Omar Khayham used to sing in his desert tents to the stars.
The chapter on John Wayne is perhaps the book's greatest success, and it is interview-based. But he is not always the world's most incisive interviewer, and his conversation with Marlene Dietrich reveals nothing new, because apparently she did not want it to. I did like the raw come-ons Ryan O'Neal, Bogdanovich's companion during the encounter with Dietrich, made to her. "I dream about your legs and I wake up screaming," he leers.
Dietrich replies, "Me too."Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors OverviewPeter Bogdanovich, known primarily as a director, film historian and critic, has been working with professional actors all his life. He started out as an actor (he debuted on the stage in his sixth-grade production of Finian's Rainbow); he watched actors work (he went to the theater every week from the age of thirteen and saw every important show on, or off, Broadway for the next decade); he studied acting, starting at sixteen, with Stella Adler (his work with her became the foundation for all he would ever do as an actor and a director).Now, in his new book, Who the Hell's in It, Bogdanovich draws upon a lifetime of experience, observation and understanding of the art to write about the actors he came to know along the way; actors he admired from afar; actors he worked with, directed, befriended. Among them: Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Cassavetes, Charlie Chaplin, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, Ben Gazzara, Audrey Hepburn, Boris Karloff, Dean Martin, Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, Frank Sinatra, and James Stewart.Bogdanovich captures—in their words and his—their work, their individual styles, what made them who they were, what gave them their appeal and why they've continued to be America's iconic actors.On Lillian Gish: "the first virgin hearth goddess of the screen . . . a valiant and courageous symbol of fortitude and love through all distress." On Marlon Brando: "He challenged himself never to be the same from picture to picture, refusing to become the kind of film star the studio system had invented and thrived upon—the recognizable human commodity each new film was built around . . . The funny thing is that Brando's charismatic screen persona was vividly apparent despite the multiplicity of his guises . . . Brando always remains recognizable, a star-actor in spite of himself. " Jerry Lewis to Bogdanovich on the first laugh Lewis ever got onstage: "I was five years old. My mom and dad had a tux made—I worked in the borscht circuit with them—and I came out and I sang, ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' the big hit at the time . . . It was 1931, and I stopped the show—naturally—a five-year-old in a tuxedo is not going to stop the show? And I took a bow and my foot slipped and hit one of the floodlights and it exploded and the smoke and the sound scared me so I started to cry. The audience laughed—they were hysterical . . . So I knew I had to get the rest of my laughs the rest of my life, breaking, sitting, falling, spinning."John Wayne to Bogdanovich, on the early years of Wayne's career when he was working as a prop man: "Well, I've naturally studied John Ford professionally as well as loving the man. Ever since the first time I walked down his set as a goose-herder in 1927. They needed somebody from the prop department to keep the geese from getting under a fake hill they had for Mother Machree at Fox. I'd been hired because Tom Mix wanted a box seat for the USC football games, and so they promised jobs to Don Williams and myself and a couple of the players. They buried us over in the properties department, and Mr. Ford's need for a goose-herder just seemed to fit my pistol."These twenty-six portraits and conversations are unsurpassed in their evocation of a certain kind of great movie star that has vanished. Bogdanovich's book is a celebration and a farewell.From the Hardcover edition.

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