The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York, and Hollywood

by Gavin Lambert and Ivan Moffat

Book Overview

Here is a fascinating portrait of Hollywood screenwriter Ivan Moffat, whose lonely, aristocratic childhood led to a precociously fashionable and sensual life in London's High Bohemia in the late... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375422471
• ISBN13: 9780375422478
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Admiration and Mystery

Moffat called his autobiography ABSOLUTE HEAVEN, from a phrase his parents often used when he, as a child, asked them what they had done the night before, in the glittering London social scene they inhabited. "Went to a party, darling. It was absolute heaven." Moffat wrote his memoirs out by hand in a series of notebooks, and one of them has disappeared, so the book takes an awfully big jump right at an exciting part, and we land down again ten years later. Gavin Lambert, the novelist and biographer, fills in the gaps in his own way. Lambert knew Moffat himself, and also interviewed many of the survivors: people who had known him from all walks of life. If you have recently read THE OTHER CHEKHOV, the biography of acting coach Michael Chekhov, and you've been curious about Darlington Hall, the experimental British art and drama school at which Chekhov worked, you will find a lot more of it in ABSOLUTE HEAVEN, for Ivan Moffat was a student there, and very close to Beatrice Straight and her family (the patrons of the hall). I found Moffat's late in life passion for Caroline Blackwood very touching, and the realization at the end of his life that he was actually the father of Caroline's daughter Ivana is wonderfully told and imagined. Another fine section details his work with the Hollywood director George Stevens on the US Army filmmaking unit that travelled and filmed everything they could from D-Day to Auschwitz to Stalingrad. Talk about high adventure! The mystery that remains is the unevenness of Moffat's artistic production. After the war, his work with Stevens on the scripts of GIANT, SHANE, and A PLACE IN THE SUN is exemplary, and Lambert mounts a welcome defense of THEY CAME TO CORDURA and the ill-fated BHOWANI JUNCTION that makes you want to see these pictures once again. And yet, at the end of the day, Moffat remains fairly opaque, as though his life had been led at such a clip there was no time for him really to make any sense out of it, especially in the painted bungalows of Hollywood and the traffic lights of the Sunset Strip. This isn't Gavin Lambert's masterpiece (that would probably be THE GOODBY PEOPLE) but in some ways it feels closer to autobiography than Lambert's own memoir pieces do. He is always a writer worth reading and one of the only living writers whose hand I would like to shake.