Word: badly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...speech, one of his more interminable. It is the ninth and last film to employ the talents of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and for that distinction a picture worth seeing; but on all other counts it stinks. Stanley Kramer has degenerated from one of Hollywood's more interesting bad moviemakers into one of its most maudlin. The crude but somehow compelling live-TV quality of Judgment at Nuremberg and Ship of Fools, painted with crayon and musicalized by DeVol, blessed with Sidney Poitier, reveals Kramer to be an exceedingly dull thinker and hardly any artist...
...actor, Tracy emerged from a post-war recharging period literally the top. In George Cukor's Pat and Mike ('52), he gave the best of a memorable series of comedy performances opposite Hepburn, conclusively reconciling his own considerable presence ("treelike" to extend a comparison of Hepburn's) with acting. Bad Day at Black Rock ('55), though not a great movie, gave Tracy the chance to show off his genius freely and create a hero good for all violent communities everywhere, always. Again in The Old Man and The Sea ('57), this time more emphatically, Tracy staged the trick of giving...
...says no. Tommy says yes. Dickie sighs. CBS says bad taste. Tommy, popping another ulcer pill into his mouth, says O.K., we quit. Dickie yawns elaborately. CBS says O.K., O.K., you can say, "Good night all you draft dodgers in Canada. We'll probably be seeing you next November," but no fair using that line "Go fa la la yourself...
...what of "reading" books? Here it seems that the most depressing of all laws-Gresham's, that bad money drives out the good-applies as mercilessly to good books as it does to funny money. The man who has sold the most novels is Erie Stanley Gardner-159 million copies of 125 titles. At least he is a highly competent mystery craftsman. The author who has sold the most in single-copy titles is the semiliterate fantasist of violence and squalor, Mickey Spillane, who has written seven novels that have never sold less than 4,000,000 copies apiece...
Memory is a subtle liar and often a bad writer of fiction-but it can be a marvelous storyteller. Very early in this rush of remembrance of a Brooklyn boyhood 30 years ago, it is clear that Gerald Green has let memory do all the work. His hero, Albert Abrams, is a skinny, precocious, unheroic kid who tags fearfully after a gang of asphalt Iroquois called the Raiders. The book follows Albert and his heroes-a splendidly underprivileged crew of dirty-cut young men-through a wild summer day in the Brownsville streets. The action begins with the formal curbside...