Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...comedy, Handle With Care rivals a combination of Hollywood '30s movies and slapstick. Perhaps the funniest sequence traces the relationship between two women who discover that they are married to the same man, a trucker who conveniently spends most of his time away from his two homes. After sustaining the initial shock, Dallas Angel (Ann Wedgeworth) and Portland Angel (Marcia Rodd) compare their "mutual" husband's bedside manner over drinks--many, many drinks. Wedgeworth's naive and honest persona and Rodd's cool, assertive character play off each other perfectly; both actresses are accomplished in their timing and facial expression...
Author Truscott, a disaffected former West Pointer who has written mainly in Manhattan's Village Voice, never flatly accuses Charles Allen of direct Mafia connections, but the implications are strong. For example, he calls Allen "the godfather of Hollywood," and traces his rise in the film industry through a maze of allegedly Mob-infiltrated enterprises. According to Truscott, Charles Allen in 1955 bought a 25% stake in a Bahamian company that controlled a casino that was "manipulated" by Crime Boss Meyer Lansky, and one of Allen's partners in the venture was Wallace Groves, a convicted swindler. Then, aided...
...although this is fine, fine country music--the only bit of filler is a lackluster cover of Bill Monroe's "Uncle Pen"--four key songs, beginning with "Feeling Better" and continuing on side two with "The New South," "Tennessee," and "It's a Long, Long Way to Hollywood" present as evocative a picture of the musician and the road as any recent performers, including Jackson Browne...
...story. All the absurd trivialities of plot and subplot--with IRA goons, federal goons, British goons and even a few goons on personal retainer to the President of the United States, all doing their best to run each other over and muddy the storyline--finally mesh together in Hollywood style. Perhaps the setting makes the book more interesting than it really is: having set his story in Cambridge, Reid takes a name-dropper's perverse delight in alluding regularly to parts of the Harvard campus, which he invariably misspells. It is simply fun to sit back and feel superior...
...Monty was no longer up to challenges of any kind. Sometime during the early '50s, at the very moment of his triumph, he became addicted to drink and drugs. After a catastrophic Hollywood car crash in 1956, which left his face an awkward mask, his decline became a slide. Bosworth seems to pin much of the problem on guilt over his homosexuality - or bisexuality, as she maintains it was - but the evidence is totally unpersuasive. Good as her book is, it offers no real reason for Monty's down fall, which was as mysterious as his talent...