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THE STARS
BY RICHARD SCHICKEL
Designed by ALLEN HURLBURT
THE STARS is the most beautiful book about the movies ever published. An extraordinary union of arresting pictures and discerning text, it distills and enlivens the essence of more than one hundred star personalities. In so doing it examines those forces of personality, public demand and professional tactics which converge to create a star. At long last, there is a definitive book which gives an authoritative answer to the question: "What makes a star?"
Here are the prototypical stars — William S. Hart, Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Douglas Fairbanks, The Keystone Kops — who established the great tradition of screen stardom. And here are the great stars of the twenties who broadened that tradition and made it a part of everyone's life: Rudolph Valentino, surprisingly fragile and pathetic; Garbo, the enigmatic ikon; Von Stroheim, the militant genius; John Barrymore, acting out his private tragedy in public; Wallace Reid and John Gilbert, the fallen idols; Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Mae Murray, even Tom Mix, cowboy to the jazz age.
Here, too, is a section devoted to the screen's great comedians: the incomparable Chaplin and his superb silent contemporaries — Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd — plus the men who strived so mightily to maintain the comic tradition after the arrival of sound — The Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Walt Disney.
Mr. Schickel and Mr. Hurlburt masterfully illuminate the effect of sound on the stars, how it changed our relationship to them and how it changed the very nature of movies themselves. Here are word and picture profiles on the Singing Boys and Dancing Girls, the mobsters, monsters, midgets and athletes who lightened our burdens in depression days. There are also appreciations of such superb stylists as Fred Astaire and Katherine Hepburn, delightful recollections of such refreshing heroines as Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard.
Another section is devoted to a warmly perceptive discussion of five great American heroes — Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and James Stewart — who rose to fame in the thirties and whose wondrous hold on the national imagination has persisted into our own time.
Because THE STARS is a book which beautifully balances its appreciation for the nostalgic
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