THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE DOLCE VITA: The Adventures of an Actor in Hollywood, Paris, and Rome

Having worked in the movie business for so long, Knox may have met everyone. Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Bo Derek, Sophia Loren, Laurence Olivier, James Dean, Al Pacino... the list goes on and on. Regrettably, that list is the basis for the book's structure, with almost every one of the more than 60 mini-chapters devoted to an anecdote about a particular celebrity. Born in Brooklyn in 1922, Knox began his career on the New York stage and, after serving in WWII, made a promising start as a contract actor in Hollywood—part of the stable containing Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. But after several fairly successful B-movie roles, Knox was blacklisted, and his acting career was, with a few exceptions, over. But Knox is plucky, not given to bitterness or defeat. He started a second career as a dialogue coach and screenplay translator of European movies. The influence of so many years working with screenplays is obvious and unfortunate: the book is choppy; the scenes are too short, most often beginning with the entrance of the star ("Clark Gable! The King!"; "The Italian icon: Marcello Mastroianni!"); and several chapters end with italicized epilogues ("fast forwards"). Only on the rare occasion—usually involving Mailer, who wrote the introduction for the book—do his celebrity anecdotes rise above name-dropping to achieve real meaning. It's a book of moments rather than stories. Knox clearly had a remarkable life; it's too bad it doesn't translate to the page. (May)