![]() But there is so much sex and food and high life and glittering prose in these loosely woven memoirs that she can be pardoned her presumptuous title. ![]() For one thing, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison scarcely touches upon her professional life (her books include Italian Days and Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses). Wilder Times is especially valuable for illuminating this latter phase of its subject's career - the troubled decades after he had collected a fistful of Oscars for writing such witty films as "Ninotchka," "Midnight," and "Ball of Fire" and for writing and directing a series of dark melodramas - including "Double Indemnity," "The Lost Weekend," and "Sunset Boulevard" - along with the ribald farce "Some Like It Hot." Though he hasn't made a movie in 15 years, at age 90 Wilder, in the words of his creation Norma Desmond, is "still big."ĭON'T LET THE TITLE fool you. "Kiss Me Stupid" was drubbed by critics and avoided by audiences, but Lally speculates that it might have fared better had Sellers stuck with it (assuming, that is, that the great British comedian and the great American director had reconciled their differences). The battle of wills had just started when a heart attack forced Sellers to bow out (he was replaced by Ray Walston). "Both directors," Lally writes, had "encouraged their actor to toss aside the script and let his comic imagination go wild." Such liberty-taking was the furthest thing from Wilder's mind. Strangelove" with Stanley Kubrick and "A Shot in the Dark" with Blake Edwards. Actor Peter Sellers, on the other hand, was a frisky improviser who reported for work on Wilder's "Kiss Me Stupid" in 1964 fresh from having made "Dr. Director Billy Wilder, the subject of Kevin Lally's fast-paced, entertaining biography, has always been a stickler for a script's exact words - and understandably so: Driven by an immigrant's zest for American vernacular, he wrote them himself, with the aid of such collaborators as Charles Brackett, I.A.L. It represents the first effort to evaluate the English-language historical literature on the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.ONE OF THE MOST intriguing matches in Hollywood history was cut short by illness. This article aims to initiate discussion of this under-researched history by addressing what has been written, by whom, and for what purpose. The paucity of historical knowledge is all the more surprising given their visibility and notoriety. Despite the Witnesses' broad historical role in defining and shaping understandings of religious tolerance, freedom of conscience, and civil liberties around the world, historians have paid very little attention to the Witnesses, with the notable exception of their treatment in Nazi Germany and the United States and Canada in wartime. From their humble origins as small, loose-knit groups of Bible students in Pennsylvania in the 1870s, Charles Taze Russell and his followers laid the foundations of a highly visible, and frequently controversial, worldwide religious organisation known since 1931 as the Jehovah's Witnesses. ![]()
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