Related Subjects: Author Index Reviews Page 1 2
Book reviews for "Lambert,_Gavin" sorted by average review score:
3 Plays: The Boys in the Band, a Breeze from the Gulf, for Reasons That Remain Unclear
Published in Paperback by Alyson Pubns (1996)
Authors: Mart Crowley and Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $11.16
List price: $13.95 (that's 20% off!)
Used price: $1.39
Collectible price: $10.59
Buy one from zShops for: $6.00
Average review score:

fsdafdfas
ncnzxn<

Boys in the band is hilarious
I found this play to be one of the funniest I have ever read. Black humour at its most hilarious.

Great Plays
I wonder sometimes why so few people know who Mart Crowley is. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to call him one of the most gifted and important American playwrights, and yet nobody I've talked to, outside a handful of gay men who are in the theater or who read too much, has known even his name.

The Boys in the Band is the best-known of Mr. Crowley's plays: that's because, well, it IS the best, and also because there was an excellent movie made of it, which is as often seen as the play is read or seen on stage. The play is a brutal birthday party one evening in New York in 1969, and the guest of honor is guilt itself: eight gay men in their 30s gather and say horrible things to each other, which reflect more on themselves than on each other. Each in his own way is caught in the war zone between his homosexuality and the pressure from society to be something else (and goodness knows, the play opened just a few months before Stonewall). The most incredible thing about the play (in my opinion) is Mr. Crowley's evenness: you get the feeling that he is just showing life as he knew it, and not trying to judge or blame anyone or anything--rather a big feat for all the hate that had poisoned that life-as-he-knew-it.

One criticism has been consistently directed at The Boys in the Band over the years, that it depicts only guilt-ridden self-hating gay men who wish for all the world that they weren't gay. All I can say to this is, well, yes; but I am only 19 and I know exactly why these particular men are so guilt-ridden and self-hating, not because I grew up before Stonewall (I was still in diapers at the beginning of AIDS), but because it's STILL tough to be gay in America. This kind of guilt and this kind of self-hate haven't disappeared--I experienced them first-hand in the 1990s. If The Boys in the Band seems a bit narrow for focusing only on that, then it's remarkably deep in spite of its narrowness.

The other two plays in this collection are also quite good. They too are built on Mr. Crowley's cl! arity and evenness of vision, but it seems (unfortunately) that they'll always suffer in comparison to the first play. They're good reads. I recommend them highly.

I can't justify my claim to you that Mr. Crowley is one of the great American playwrights--how can just one person justify that? The claim, I hope, will justify itself as future theater-goers, movie-goers, and readers (you!!) match Mr. Crowley's clarity and get to know his plays. For all the depressing subject matter, the plays are gripping, quite funny, searingly intelligent, and very rewarding. He sees a lot.

On Cukor
Published in Unknown Binding by Putnam ()
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $
Used price: $15.00
Collectible price: $23.96
Average review score:

A Book For Anyone Who Has Ever Seen A Movie
An intelligent and affectionate tribute to one of Hollywood's great directors. The photo collection is an amazing scrapbook of a career that seems impossible, but lasted for almost a century. He worked with everybody! Robert Trachtenberg has meticulously chronicled the life of this remarkable and gentle man and captured the magic of movies through familiar images that now have even more relevance. Is this the same "R. Trachtenberg" -- the photographer, whose name I've seen in magazines? His artist's eye is as keen as his choice of subject. George Cukor is an American treasure. You will treasure this book that celebrates his life and work.

A Remarkable Book on a Remarkable Man
When I first saw this book I asked myself, "is it just another standard Hollywood biography?" However, after a few minutes into it, I realized this is the kind of book one encounters rarely and values enormously -- provocative, highly literate, engaging, terrifically insightful, beautifully constructed (in its writing and art direction, including some magnificent photographs of Cukor and his actors). It truly gives the impression that you are not only "inside" Cukor's elegant, complicated mind ... but inside one of his classic movies. It's a perfect Christmas gift for anyone interested in Hollywood.

The goodby people
Published in Unknown Binding by Simon and Schuster ()
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $
Used price: $1.75
Collectible price: $6.00
Average review score:

Welcome to L.A.
When I was sixteen I used to come out West to visit my aunt,uncle and cousins in the San Fenando Valley. That was the first timethat I read the Goodbye People, but it was only the first of many readings over the past twenty years. I now live in San Francisco but Lambert's cinematic voice still echoes. You see, Gavin Lambert writes about the Los Angeles we are all trying to get to--beautiful, seductive, mystic and lush---but also spoiled, corrupt, empty and desolate. Lambert's gift is that he paints the canvas with scenes of L.A. life--the business of "pictures"(movies), lovely bodies, the arresting ocean and beach, the panopoly of healers and visionaries, the haunting wail of a land that summons us to find everything we have ever dreamed of, only to show us that this mirror is broken. There is no destimation to our desire, only our endless wanting.That is the portrait of Southern California Gavin so brilliantly sketches.

If you have ever dreamed of California, Lambert's books will inspire you, inflame you, and quell that bittersweet stirring in your soul for the golden state.

Gwtw; The Making of Gone With the Wind.
Published in Hardcover by Little Brown & Company (1973)
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $7.95
Used price: $3.95
Collectible price: $12.71
Average review score:

Behind the scenes of Gone With the Wind
This is a great book about the making of Gone With the Wind, one of the greatest films ever made. There are lots and lots of photos but they are in black and white, not color. The text is entertaining and full of lots of details about the stars, production team, writers and MGM executives. A must for any GWTW fan.

Inside Daisy Clover (Midnight Classics)
Published in Paperback by Serpent's Tail (1996)
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $11.99
Used price: $2.40
Collectible price: $10.00
Buy one from zShops for: $5.50
Average review score:

Hollywood Insanity From The Inside Out
Told in the form a teenager's casually kept journal, "Inside Daisy Clover" is the story of a street-wise, hard-knocks kid with plenty of common sense who unexpectly vaults to stardom in the 1950s--only to find herself so much camera-fodder for dream factory machinery. Determined to hold onto her own values, Gavin Lambert's Daisy Clover becomes one of the most memorable women in modern American fiction: witty, rebellious, and unwilling to give away an inch of personal integrity even while drowning in Hollywood's ocean of self-created myth. Easily one of the finest books and most readable novels I've read in many years, you'll want to keep this one your shelf and return to it again and again.

The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life (Midnight Classics Series)
Published in Paperback by Serpent's Tail (1998)
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $11.99
Used price: $6.35
Collectible price: $8.99
Buy one from zShops for: $10.17
Average review score:

Not "The Day of the Locust," but close...
One of the blurbs on the back of this book (from the Times Literary Supplement)suggests that it "earns a place on anyone's shelves along with Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Last Tycoon' and Nathaniel West's 'The Day of the Locust.'" And it's tempting to make that comparison, considering the setting and the depiction of the characters found here.

"The Slide Area" is a more tender novel than "The Day of the Locust" but whose portraits are equally piercing. The book is divided into seven sections, and, taken on their own, stand as short stories to a larger collection; but I read the book as one novel. The narrator is a faceless and nameless script-writer who seems untouched by all that surrounds him. He is almost a neutral bystander to the proceedings he describes, in the way Nick is in "The Great Gatsby." Lambert describes the geography of Los Angeles, Hollywood and Pacific Palisades with a keen eye, catching all of the glorious detail of that area. The main character is drawn to the "Slide Area" of the book's title: the place, like the people, is in constant danger of crumbling and falling off into the ocean. The narrator struggles to keep his feet firm in this precarious terrain, as the people he does business with seem unable to keep their heads above water.

It's an ugly world Lambert depicts, but there is a heart at its center, and that is what I find so attractive about this novel. While the stories of what goes on behind the scenes of the film industry are told in frank and brutally honest ways, it's the heart at the center of this world that brought me pleasure. It's a sensitive story Lambert tells in these mini-stories. The pacing of the chapters is excellent. Just as I was sensing an end to one story, it would come to an end, the feeling of closure coming at just the right moment.

So, it is the same geography (both literally and figuratively) as "The Day of the Locust" but this book lacks the gruesome punch found in "Day." This is NOT a fault I have with the book; its tenderness endures long after one has finished it.

Nazimova: A Biography
Published in Hardcover by Knopf (1997)
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $32.50
Used price: $12.55
Collectible price: $12.16
Buy one from zShops for: $14.99
Average review score:

The Nazimova Few Know About
Most people only know the Alla Nazimova through her connection with Rudolph Valentino and her "gay" silent film "Salome." She is nearly always reviled as a domineering, spiteful lesbian queen of Hollywood whose own ego led to her fall.
This book provides a completely different picture of the woman behind the name. Her horrendous treatment as a child definitely molded her personality. An extremely talented actress, she earned her stardom on stage, screen and then stage again, inspiring many of the greatest playwrites of the early 20th century to write plays, many for her.
The author reveals much of Nazimova's sadness and disappointment in her personal life and career, her gullibility when it came to trusting friends with her money, and the vast number of women and the few men with whom she had love affairs.
Through exhaustive research of Nazimova's voluminous but unfinished (and unpublished) autobiography, interveiws with the few living persons who met her, and the letters and memoirs of a vast number of acquaintances and co-workers, the author has constructed a fascinating portrayal of a fragile, brilliant, yet tempermental child-woman who may well have been the greatest actress of at least the first half of the twentieth century.
Readers will be surprised to read the rave accounts of Nazimova's unparalleled talent her from Truman Capote, Ibsen, Shaw and Katherine Hepburn, as well as the doting love and companionship showered on the elderly Nazimova by her godaughter Nancy Davis, later Nancy Reagan.
I highly recommend this book to those who love silent films and bizzare, talented personalities.

Wonderful profile of an extremely amazing and talented actre
Alla Nazimova was my Godmother and I have heard many stories about her over the years so I was delighted to see a book written about her by Gavin Lambert. I found the book to be fastanating and learned so much about this woman who brought Ibsen and Chekhov among others to the theaters in America. She appears to be a very private yet complicated indivdual who knew exactly what she wanted and went after it with her whole being. She accomplished so much on the stage and in films that it is a shame so few people today remember her. Perhaps Lambert's book will rekindle that interest again in such a great lady of the theater.

A book to cry by
an absolute beauty of a boo

Norma Shearer: A Life
Published in Hardcover by Knopf (1990)
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $24.95
Used price: $59.44
Collectible price: $68.82
Average review score:

Norma Shearer aka Mrs. Thalberg : Queen of the MGM Studio
Norma Shearer wasn't the sexiest, smartest or most accomplished of the MGM stars in Hollywood's golden era. She was, however, married to Irving Thalberg the boy genius of the vast studio. Thalberg chose excellent roles for his wife, Norma shone in such films as "The Barretts of Wimpole Street,"; Marie
Antoinette", "The Women" and Idiot's Delight with Gable. Lambert has done his homework presenting "all you need to know" about Ms. Shearer. The book also deals in detail with the Thalberg career. This book is great for a quiet Saturday at home or a day at the beach. The lavish black and white photos are great!. Enjoy Norma Shearer in this excellently written book!

Canadian Kid rises from Cinderella to MGM Queen!
As I fan of the classic era of Hollywood glitz and glamour I was fascinated by the life of Shearer as told by Gavin Lambert!
Norma was a star in the Silent Era who became a superstar when she wed movie mogul Irving Thalberg. The Thalberg marriage was solid in a sinking sand land of "Reno" divorces and juicy scandal. Lambert delineates the rise of Thalberg to boy wonder at MGM as Mr. Mayer's right hand man. Norma is lesser known than the other goddesses of the era but is someone you might wish to know better through her movies and this fine biography. Among the affairs she had as widow Thalberg were the ones she had with Mickey Rooney and George Raft! Enjoy this fun read for enrichment and nostalgic remembrance of the great era of MGM magic!

Best Shearer Bio, but ...
This is a generally well written and researched book.There is a lag in the center section were the topic veers from Norma Shearer to husband, Irving Thalberg. It also suffers from not having insights from Shearer's intimates, including her daughter and second husband, who were both alive at the time of the book's publication. Shearer's post MGM years, from 1942 to 1983, are given a thin treatment. Lambert makes a couple of glaring errrors, such as when he describes a scene in "Marie Antoinette" where the Shearer character learns she is to die. There's no such scene, and given the wide availablily of the video, no excuse. Also, Lambert gets the inscription on her tomb wrong. He wrote that it reads "Norma Shearer Arrouge," when in fact it reads "Norma Arrouge."

Mainly About Lindsay Anderson
Published in Hardcover by Knopf (26 September, 2000)
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $29.95
Used price: $4.95
Collectible price: $10.59
Buy one from zShops for: $4.50
Average review score:

Superficial and dull
Too much Lambert: i.e., creaky, stilted, and boring.

His "outing" of the late Nicholas Ray is offensive and exploitive. Moreover, I find it difficult to believe that the explosively talented, sophisticated Ray took Lambert as a lover.

A Unique and Deeply Insightful Book
Gavin Lambert has written many books about the motion picure business, both fictional and non, but this is far and away the most remarkable. A tribute to a great filmmaker and a through examination of world he lived in, it's also a partial autobiography -- with Lambert's digressions on his affair with Nicholas Ray sharply constrating with Anderson's difficulties in having the lover he longed for. Anderson was capable of producing some of the most indelible homoerotic images in the history of the cinema, yet his own life suffered from sexual and emotional constraint.

No one who wants to know about the British cinema, or one of the most remarkable creative talents Great Britain has ever produced, can afford to pass up this book.

A fine study for film buffs and cinema history students.
British filmmaker Anderson's films were witty social commentaries for the late 20th century, while his documentaries were revealing and educational. Mainly About Lindsay Anderson provides a biographical review of his life and an assessment of his career and achievements, from his early days as a movie-goer to his later influential creations within the industry. Any studying modern film history will find this a fine study.

In the night all cats are grey
Published in Unknown Binding by W. H. Allen ()
Author: Gavin Lambert
Amazon base price: $
Used price: $6.00
Collectible price: $15.00
Average review score:

A good book if you enjoy solitude
I first read this book about ten years ago. I was captivated by the fact that the character felt so comfortable with his loneliness. It is a pity that the widow turned out to be his mother. The imagery in the final chapter, after the killing was outstanding.

Related Subjects: Author Index Reviews Page 1 2

Reviews are from readers at Amazon.com. To add a review, follow the Amazon buy link above.