Word: gablers
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...Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, has written a benchmark biography that fuses meticulous research with a deft grasp of the cultural nuances of an era when virtually everyone who mattered paid homage to Winchell at his table at Manhattan's celebrity hangout, the Stork Club. Gabler captures everything except the essence of Winchell's breathless dot-dot-dot tabloid style. Never does the author parse an entire column or broadcast to make Winchell accessible to a generation that only dimly recalls him as the narrator of the 1960s TV series The Untouchables...
These bizarre juxtapositions, commingling the solemn and the sordid, helped forge the legend of Big Brother as newspaper columnist. In the words of a 1933 ad slogan, WINCHELL HE SEES ALL HE KNOWS ALL. With its rightful emphasis on the power-mad side of Winchell's persona, Gabler's biography validates Burt Lancaster's chilling portrayal of gossipmonger J.J. Hunsecker in the 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success. (In real life, Winchell, in cinema noir fashion, had his daughter Walda carted off to an asylum in a straitjacket in paternal rage against an unsuitable marriage.). The same haunting sense...
Amid the rich detail, Gabler at times poetically captures the desperate hunger that fueled Winchell. There is a telling scene of the columnist wading in the surf at Miami Beach in the late 1940s with his lawyer Ernest Cuneo. "Well, King Canute," asks Cuneo, "what more do you really want?" With tremendous vehemence, Winchell replies, "I want all the news in the world." Then the world's most powerful columnist adds, "And all its money too." With these values Winchell would truly be at home in the 1990s...
...been a waif-eyed, bassoon-voiced, ironhearted daredevil named Juliet Stevenson. U.S. audiences are apt to know her only from the cult film Truly, Madly, Deeply. But on the boards in London, her range is astonishing, from the hoydenish Rosalind in As You Like It to the nihilistic Hedda Gabler, from the sexually awakening adolescent of Troilus and Cressida to the avenging victim of Death and the Maiden. She approximates the emotional clarity of Vanessa Redgrave, the assertive power of Judi Dench and the braying, spiteful fun of Maggie Smith -- and adds an androgynous beauty suited equally to Shakespeare...
...HEDDA GABLER, A FIERCELY INDEPENdent woman trapped in bourgeois-marriage hell, keeps a set of pistols around the house, and it's only a matter of time before one goes off. The tragedy may be inevitable, but a new MASTERPIECE THEATRE production of Ibsen's classic play (PBS, March 28) is possibly the first to make it seem like a blessed relief. Fiona Shaw's self-absorbed, unsympathetic portrayal makes Hedda ditso from the start: darting, distracted gestures, nervous facial tics and a voice that drops to an inaudible whisper about every third line. Stephen Rea (The Crying Game...