Reviews for Kohar

The average rating for Kohar based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-04-09 00:00:00 Hassan Sherif I flung myself from the first Loos memoir straight into this, the second, and enjoyed it just as much. She's a laugh-out-loud read, although her sense of chronology can be maddening. She leaps about all over the place, which has the effect of making her seem perpetually girlish; forever the wisecracking flapper with her windblown bob, long after hair-dos have moved on. I did my sums and worked out she was tapping forty when she took the job offer from MGM, so while she might have LOOKED like a teenager, she'd most definitely been around the block a bit. In a girlishly gamin way, of course. Nita never strikes me as tarty, although she clearly had her opportunities. Indeed, it's her steadfast loyalty to husband Mr E that was one of the most eye-opening aspects of the book for me. Between the first memoir and the second John Emerson took a major nosedive in my affections. He seemed endearingly eccentric in part one, and Nita's devotion made sense; he was the man who lifted her from fruitless toils in Griffith's script room sweat shop. But by part two, where Nita freely (and yet undamningly) reveals how he exploited and robbed her across the subsequent decades, I just wanted to shriek. I found the anecdote about Emerson quitting Metro on her behalf in order to sign her up with Sam Goldwyn far more shocking than the later story of trying to throttle his Buggie on the sofa. The events around Mr E's eventual institutionalisation were a little vague, revealed very obliquely, I thought, via a remembered conversation with a priest. Perhaps that stuff was just too difficult for her to tackle head on? Yet she faced everything else so unflinchingly. One of the brightest aspects of the memoir was how enjoyably Jean Harlow comes across; Nita clearly loved her. I read a lacklustre biography of Harlow earlier this year that had none of this sparkle that Nita captures at all. Jean was clearly a riot, and a sweetie to boot, and Nita saw plenty of it. A terrific book.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-08 00:00:00 Antonio Veracini Does it deserve five stars? No. Am I giving it five stars regardless? Hell yes. Anita Loos, one of the first (if not the first) script writers in Hollywood is a fascinating woman. Witty to a fault, the book explores her successful failure of a marriage, her failed successes at affairs, and the all antics of the industry between the two. Even taking anything with a massive grain of salt, it's a fantastic read about an equally fantastic character. Just ignore some of Loos' outdated thoughts about gender equality and Women's Lib. It's one of the first Hollywood memoirs I've read where I sincerely believe it wasn't ghost written. I can see how Anita thrived in the pre-Code era, her snarkiness packs punch after punch. More writers could stand to follow her example, myself included.