Word: algren
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...with the Golden Arm. Nelson Algren's tale of a hot dealer who deals himself a cold card: heroin. A painful, powerful story of human bondage, in which Frank Sinatra is unforgettable (see below...
...office. On the screen, however, the picture provides much more than the cheap thrill it promises. The hero is a man who gets lost on the West Side of Chicago and does not bother to go looking for himself. The script, mild enough in comparison with Nelson Algren's cruel, powerful novel (TIME, Sept. 2, 1949) on which it is based, has nevertheless the crudeness of a thing scraped off some metropolitan sidewalk. But it has a human splendor, too-as the story of what happens to a man who cannot bear to let life itself happen...
...After viewing a rough cut of Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, United Artists decided to release the picture whether it receives Production Code approval or not. The story from the Nelson Algren novel deals with a young Chicago gambler (Frank Sinatra) who becomes a drug addict; thus it conflicts with the code's anti-narcotics clause. U.A. may have been influenced by the fact that Preminger's The Moon Is Blue, which it released without a code seal, made a killing at the box office. ¶The box-office success of Universal...
...Producer Otto Preminger, working on Nelson Algren's Man with the Golden Arm (about a drug addict), announced that he may release his film without the Production Code seal. Explained one Hollywood observer: "You can't reduce a narcotics addict to an offbeat type...
...writers go these days, Author Algren is fairly wellfixed. The U.S. once was accustomed to the starving writer who did some of his most important work bargaining in hock shops and died broke, e.g., O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe. It was also accustomed to the spectacularly rich writer who made a fortune with his gold-plated typewriter, e.g., James Hilton and Zane Grey. However true or false these extreme images may have been, they describe few living U.S. authors. In his Democracy in America (1835-1840), Alexis de Tocqueville said: "In democratic times the public frequently treat authors...