Cagney
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4.6 • 7개의 평가
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- US$14.99
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- US$14.99
출판사 설명
John McCabe's participation in the writing of James Cagney's autobiography, the many years of friendship that followed, and an intense period of interview and discussion in preparation for a musical comedy based on Cagney's life--a show that never saw the light of day--make him Cagney's ideal biographer. And, indeed, he has written a searching chronicle of this major actor's life and career, packed with history and anecdote, and profusely illustrated.
Cagney came from a poor Irish-American New York family but once he found his métier as an actor, it was not long before he was recognized as a brilliantly energetic and powerful phenomenon. After the tremendous impact of Public Enemy--in which he notoriously pushed half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face--he was typecast as a gangster because of the terrifying violence that seemed to be pent up within him. Years of pitched battle with Warner Brothers finally liberated him from those roles, and he went on to star in such triumphs as the musicals Yankee Doodle Dandy (winning the 1942 Oscar for best actor) and Love Me or Leave Me. Even so, one of his greatest later roles involved a return to crime--as the psychopathic killer in the terrifying White Heat. He retired from films in 1961 after making Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three, only to return twenty years later for Ragtime.
But however much Cagney personified violence and explosive energy on the screen, in life he was a quiet, introspective, and deeply private man, a poet, painter, and environmentalist, whose marriage to his early vaudeville partner was famously loyal and happy. His story is one of the few Hollywood biographies that reflect a fulfilled life as well as a spectacular career.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1974, McCabe was hired by Doubleday to ghostwrite movie legend James Cagney's autobiography, Cagney by Cagney. The hours of taped conversation and McCabe's subsequent friendship with Cagney, which lasted until the actor's death in 1984, are the heart of this affectionate biography of one of the cinema's most iconic performers. In excerpts from the biography and previously unpublished portions of the tapes, Cagney comes across as an intelligent, charming raconteur, talking in detail about his tough but joyful childhood in the streets of New York, his ferocious devotion to his family and to his wife of 62 years, his love of nature and country living. Best of all are the stories by Cagney and others of his life in show business, from the street kid to the song-and-dance man to the movies' most famous gangster in Public Enemy and White Heat. This is not really a full-scale biography--McCabe's readings of the films are perfunctory, and there's a tad too much uncritical star-gazing--but the accounts of Cagney's battles with Jack Warner over billing and money, the stories of his lifetime friendships with Spencer Tracy and Pat O'Brien and Cagney's no-nonsense, "just do it" pronouncements on the craft of acting are worth the price of the book. Fans of Cagney--and who isn't one?--will find this to be a vivid, readable portrait of one of the movie's most charismatic stars and most entertaining storytellers. The book is illustrated with more than 100 production stills, and includes an extensive listing of Cagney's stage, film and TV appearances.
