Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway
by Farley Granger
with Robert Calhoun
St. Martin’s Press. 272 pages, $26.95
IN THE PROLOGUE to his memoir, Include Me Out, Farley Granger recollects how, in December 2004, he was invited to a Luchino Visconti retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to view a restored print of Senso, the lavish 1958 melodrama in which he starred as an Austrian deserter who feigns love for a married Venetian countess and leads her into disrepute and an operatic act of revenge. Noting that he had only previously seen a butchered 1968 version of the film, cut to fit into a 90-minute format for TV, and that he was never comfortable watching himself on screen, Granger adds: “As the audience applauded at the film’s conclusion, I found myself applauding with them. Not only had I enjoyed Senso as much as they had, but I was also proud of the performance of that young actor playing Franz Mahler. For the first time in my life, I realized that in the time I had spent making films between my first movie, The North Star, in 1944, and Senso, in 1954, I had become an actor.”
