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Post by Mrs Vindecco on Jul 23, 2012 10:16:36 GMT
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Post by Mrs Vindecco on Jul 29, 2012 18:16:16 GMT
Before reading my comments, I should state that there are plenty of other reviews on this book and you probably should look at them, if you are considering buying this book. I'm not great at reviews or being that clear as to what I want to actually say. However, the following is my honest reaction to The Lost One by Stephen Youngkin, so please do not log on to this site merely to attack my opinions.
I've also done my best not to merely rewrite another version of Peter's biography, which I have to say a lot of the actual professional reviewers seem to do.
A reader can’t deny that the author did research his subject, a brief glimpse at the back pages complete with notes, a very detailed appendix and a minute list of the various interviews conducted over nearly thirty years clearly demonstrates that. Of course it’s a must read for any Lorre fan, a straightforward biography that does its best to strip away some of the dramatic myth surrounding the actor, a task that couldn’t be easy as Peter seemed prone to telling a few tall tales and not that interested in exposing his true self. The book is also stacked with anecdotes a plenty which demonstrate that Peter, far from being the menacing, murderous villain audiences were most familiar with, was intelligent with an impish, witty sense of humour, attractive to women and generally agreeable to most of his colleagues.
I have read The Lost One twice, in the past four years and still open it regularly as a reference book. I am a Lorre fan. Apart from Dwight Frye I have never really been more loyal or interested in any other actor, so I probably should love this book. However, in all honesty, I don’t. That doesn’t mean to say I hate it, far from it, but it’s not the best biography I have ever read. I have read it a second time because I was convinced I may have zoned out a couple of times upon my first reading, and I still think I probably missed the odd thing or two. Unlike some other biographies (based on subjects that I am nowhere near as passionate about) I have been hooked to the book and get through it pretty quickly. This just didn’t happen in The Lost One, I had to put it down a lot, and not just because of the heavy, 600+ pages. I did find it, at times, a rather arduous read. One review suggests that this is due to the heavy Brecht references. I wouldn’t say this is the case, as the relationship with Brecht was obviously very important to Lorre and his early influence affected Lorre’s acting style- though I do feel the writer presumes that the reader will be as familiar with Brecht as he is.
It has also been suggested by some, that any negativity towards the book is because there is lack of sensationalist gossip or dirt on Lorre. The morphine addiction and Peter’s honest attempt to cure it is covered in as much detail as possible. The infidelities, the occasional cruelty and the various dubious financial woes are mentioned, but are pussyfooted around. I don’t like sensationalism or knocking anyone down for the sake of it, especially if they are dead and are not around to defend themselves. However if I want to know a person, a biographer needs to focus on the negative traits as well as the positive. No one is perfect, it’s our inadequacies that make us human. Then again much of what is reported seems to have originated from vague comments based on decades old recollections or a line in FBI report.
I came away from the book feeling as if I didn’t really know Lorre, that he was as mysterious figure as Hans Beckert in the first half of M, present, but not quite visible. I can’t put my finger on why I feel like this, other than blame the manner in which the book is written. The enthusiasm and the love for Lorre that we see in the appendix, doesn’t really manifest itself in the actual prose. Other biographers do resort to sensationalism or employ cod-psychology to fill pages, which I am not a fan of, but at least there is a passion in the subject that carries you through the book and I am honestly believe this was lacking.
Would I recommend this book? To fans of Lorre, yes; for students wanting some references on Brecht, probably. To anyone that is interested in classic cinema, probably not.
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Post by meerschwein on Jul 30, 2012 1:16:36 GMT
To me it read like an expanded master's thesis. An experienced performing arts biographer would have done a better job.
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Post by Mrs Vindecco on Jul 30, 2012 17:47:58 GMT
To me it read like an expanded master's thesis. An experienced performing arts biographer would have done a better job. You've basically summed up what I was trying to say in one sentence. It is well researched, but almost clinical and cold in it's approach. |
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Post by meerschwein on Jul 31, 2012 11:42:50 GMT
To be fair, Lorre was probably a very tough subject to research because so much of his private life had to be kept secret at the time. Most movie stars you could probably turn out a decent biography about just from published sources.
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Post by woofy on Jul 31, 2012 19:06:22 GMT
Before reading my comments, I should state that there are plenty of other reviews on this book and you probably should look at them, if you are considering buying this book. I'm not great at reviews or being that clear as to what I want to actually say. Pretty damned good review for someone "not great at reviews".... |
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Post by Mrs Vindecco on Aug 1, 2012 16:42:14 GMT
To be fair, Lorre was probably a very tough subject to research because so much of his private life had to be kept secret at the time. Most movie stars you could probably turn out a decent biography about just from published sources. There seems to be a lot of authors who managed to have a private or secret double life, but a decent biography has been stitched together. I do wonder if some of the interviewees were upfront or didn't know Peter THAT well. I just felt like it was like reading a report, based on the recollections of some acquaintances, rather than friends. I suppose that was all that was on offer as Peter's closest friends had passed away by the time research started. Obviously Karren and Anne-Marie had died by the time Youngkin started his research, so we have Celia as the only wife and she has obviously been interviewed a lot from the dates at the back of the book, plus the book's official website suggests that she was visited by Youngkin on a few occasions, yet there isn't really any direct quotes and there seems to be a question mark over the exact reasons for their seperation, some hypothetical reasons, but her actual opinion, I think, is conspicuously absent. This indicates that either the author wouldn't ask the questions or Celia wasn't prepared to answer too much. I guess, in some respects, I came away from the book with more questions and it's frustrating.  Then again, that's circumstance not the fault of the author. |
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Post by Mrs Vindecco on Aug 1, 2012 18:03:02 GMT
Before reading my comments, I should state that there are plenty of other reviews on this book and you probably should look at them, if you are considering buying this book. I'm not great at reviews or being that clear as to what I want to actually say. Pretty damned good review for someone "not great at reviews".... I tend to sound pretentious or I don't know what I'm on about. I just tried to be as honest as I could be. |
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Post by meerschwein on Aug 2, 2012 12:27:57 GMT
Maybe one of the problems with the book is the very fact that he took thirty years to write it. He may have just gotten tired of it or was too engrossed in the project to have the necessary perspective to see it as a whole. But it doesn't pull together as a narrative whole and more importantly it doesn't give you a sense of what Peter was like as a performer or a private person. If you'd never seen his work, I don't think this book would make you curious to seek it out. The vitality and ingenuity and charisma that you see on the screen just don't match up with this long litany of miserable failures. Of course when you're writing about a man who was a junkie for pretty much his entire adult life you're going to have a lot of chaos in front of you. But the fact is that being a junkie wasn't Peter's downfall. In fact he learned his craft, rose to the top of his profession, and remained an international celebrity to the end of his life while hopelessly dependent on opioids. He's a fascinating case study in functional addiction.
I lent this book to a friend and she returned it saying she couldn't get through it. "I kept having to climb over all this stuff to get to what I wanted," she said. "It seemed like he threw in every scurrilous piece of information on him he could find." There's that, too. As far as avoiding sensationalism, I can only imagine what he must have left out, given that this is supposedly the unsensationalistic version. But people in the performing arts do tend to get high and screw around a lot and often do really stupid feckless things on the order of pushing grand pianos into pools, etc. That's a dog-bites-man story. In fact one of the things that I loved about Charles Swindell's biography of Charles Boyer, "The Reluctant Lover," was how Swindell kept emphasizing how seriously Boyer took his career, how he never cheated on his wife and saved all his money, like that was so weird.
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Then again, that's circumstance not the fault of the author. 
