Hollywood at Play

Boris Karloff playing baseball dressed like the Frankenstein monster! Carole Lombard bowling in high heels! Groucho Marx doing the hustle with Diana Ross! Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, just two happy roommates at the fights! Jayne Mansfield's cleavage upstaging Sophia Loren's! Orson Welles on the town with Charlie Chaplin! The famous caricatures on the walls of the Brown Derby! Posters from legendary watering holes such as the Hollywood Palladium and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, home of the Cocoanut Grove! Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Deborah Kerr, Bob Hope, Louis Armstrong, and Tallulah Bankhead, all rehearsing a sketch together for a 1950 NBC radio show! It's all here--and more--in a delightful return to the Golden Era of the silver screen, when life was fun, and everyone was beautiful and glamorous, without even trying. It's a nostalgic trip down memory lane that is well worth taking! -- Rex Reed, New York Observer
There's something refreshing about this steadfastly light-hearted book; a connoisseur of old Hollywood will find its images working like a cool breeze at twilight on a summer day. Plenty of stuff to smile over: young Clint Eastwood doing a handstand, Ernie Kovacs schooling Lucille Ball in pool, Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn engaging in swordplay in mufti on the "Adventures of Robin Hood" set, sexy shots of Joan Fontaine, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Eden bowling (not together, alas). It's not all unalloyed good times though: look at the way Orson Welles is glaring as Hedda Hopper on page 52. But even the intrigue here often has a salutary effect on the spirits.  -- Glenn Kenny, film critic for RogerEbert.com