Tallulah
Bankhead : A Scandalous Life by David Bret
It
is hard to imagine anyone leading a fuller life than Tallulah
Bankhead. She did it all -- twice. The book jacket points out that
she had 500 lovers of both sexes. She smoked 150 cigarettes a day
and drank even while performing on the Broadway stage. The author
has written a well researched book that points out the enigma that
was Bankhead. She could be willful and spoiled as a child and yet
keep people on her payroll years after firing them. Through all
the tumult and excesses of her personal life, she still managed to
give many engaging performances. In the end, her lust for life
caught up with her and her lifestyle killed her at a relatively
young age. Tallulah Bankhead is still a fascinating character and
this book is a fascinating read. -- Anonymous Review
Tallulah
Bankhead by Jeffrey L. Carrier
In a career that spanned five decades, Tallulah
Bankhead conquered practically every medium of
entertainment--theater, film, radio, and television--leaving her
mark in each one; however, her accomplishments have been little
noted by biographers. This work documents her 19 motion pictures,
56 stage plays, 167 radio appearances, and 56 television
appearances, also listing other professional appearances,
recordings, awards and tributes. Additional features include a
biographical sketch, a chronology of highlights in her life, an
annotated bibliography, and interesting photographs spanning her
career.
Lifeboat
(1944)
Part mystery, part wartime polemic, Lifeboat
finds director Alfred Hitchcock tackling a cinematic challenge
that foreshadows the self-imposed handicaps of Rope and Rear
Window. As with those subsequent features, Hitchcock confines
his action and characters to a single set, in this instance the
lone surviving lifeboat from an Allied freighter sunk by a German
U-boat in the North Atlantic. A less confident, ingenious
filmmaker might have opened up John Steinbeck's dialogue-driven
character study beyond the battered boat and its cargo of
survivors, but Hitchcock instead revels in his predicament to
exploit the enforced intimacy between his characters.
Indeed, we never actually see the doomed
freighter--the smoking ship's funnel beneath the credits simply
sinks beneath the waves, and we're plunged into the escalating
tensions between those who gradually find their way to the boat, a
band of eight English and American passengers and crew, plus a
German sailor (Walter Slezak) rescued from the U-boat, itself
destroyed by the freighter's deck gun. Heading the cast and
inevitably commanding their and our attention is the cello-voiced
Tallulah Bankhead as Connie Porter, a cynical, sophisticated
writer whose priorities seem to be hanging onto her mink and
keeping her lipstick fresh. Gradually, the others find Porter and
her lifeboat, forming a temporary community that inevitably
suggests a careful cross section of archetypes, from wealthy
industrialist (Henry Hull) to ship's boiler men (John Hodiak and
William Bendix).
Hitchcock juggles the interpersonal skirmishes
between the boat's occupants with the mystery of their German
prisoner, which itself becomes a meditation on the fine line
between nationalism and morality, a line that Slezak walks
delicately until his identity is resolved. Visually, Hitchcock
transforms his back-lot set and its rear-projected cloudbanks into
a desolate stretch of ocean, while capturing the horror of an
amputation through an economical set of images culminating in an
empty boot. --Sam Sutherland
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