Book Review: ‘The Director,' by Daniel Kehlmann
Movie stars and Nazis are irresistible ingredients in any book. 'The Director,' Daniel Kehlmann's smartly entertaining new novel about the great Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, offers both, detailing their once intimate, often symbiotic ties. Here, Greta Garbo and Joseph Goebbels have just two degrees of separation between them.
Pabst (1885-1967), along with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, was one of Weimar cinema's big three — the most cosmopolitan as well as politically engaged of the trio. Considered a leftist, Pabst achieved renown for a series of socially conscious and sexually frank silent movies, including 'Secrets of a Soul' (1926), which fiddled with Freud, and 'Pandora's Box' (1929), the film that established its star Louise Brooks as the era's most devastating flapper.
Red Pabst, as he was called early in his career, made a brilliant adjustment to sound with the antiwar film 'Westfront 1918' (1930) and 'The Threepenny Opera' (1931). But he was a bad fit in Hollywood, where, speaking little English, he arrived by way of France after the Nazis came to power. He then haplessly returned to Austria, now part of the Reich, perhaps to visit his ailing mother. Trapped by the outbreak of war, he remained there, making several apolitical 'prestige' films for the Nazis and forever compromising his reputation.
Pabst was 'a precise and exacting artist,' according to the film scholar Eric Rentschler, as well as 'an extremely private person who did not readily divulge his thoughts.' Kehlmann's Pabst is a gifted psychologist when it comes to directing actors but a stranger to himself in all other matters, a genius who thinks in motion pictures but is unable to direct the flow of his own life.
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Goin' To Kansas City: Crossroads Hotel, Great BBQ At Arthur Bryant's
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is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Are you tired of hearing about the controversy over Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle jeans ad? A remarkable thing about this latest culture-war dust-up is just how much people seem to resent its sheer existence. The whole thing feels, on its face, ginned up and silly. A mall brand decided to advertise its jeans by showing them on a hot blonde starlet, and all of a sudden the outrage mill is generating takes about how the ads symbolize either the death of woke or eugenics dog whistles — really? That's what we're doing? Yet there's a surprising staying power to the story, in a way that suggests there's more to it than meets the eye. Maybe it's because of the ad's surreal interplay with Sweeney's blonde bombshell image, revealing how much weight that symbol still carries today and the ideas it puts forward about sexuality, race, and gender. 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This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Sydney Sweeney has spent most of her career trying to embody the American archetype of the blonde bombshell — and that's a role that comes with baggage. It's a highly charged encapsulation of American fantasies and fears about white femininity: what a nice white lady should be, and what we are afraid she might be. How Hollywood built a bombshell 'The biggest misconception about me is that I am a dumb blonde with big tits,' Sweeney told Glamour UK in 2023. Then the punchline: 'I'm naturally brunette.' Blonde bombshells have a long and storied history. Hollywood's first, Jean Harlow, was also a bottle blonde. Beloved for her big-eyed comic timing and her easy, expressive charm, Harlow first broke out in the 1930s after Hollywood makeup artist Max Factor developed a platinum blonde hair color for her. 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