Word: balzacian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...long-winded story about theatrical life, the film is as crowded as the busiest Balzac novel with people, city noises, brawling and lovemaking (see BOOKS). The setting, too, is Balzacian: the sprawling plot tries to keep up with half a dozen leading characters as they move through 1848 Paris. But the film's makers, using their own script, lacked Balzac's gift for tying up dangling ends and giving a finished story some look of significance...
...thugs $3,000 for the Valdés attempt, $5,000 for the boy's death. Furthermore, he had offered $6,000 for the murder of his beautiful ex-wife Maria who escaped to the U.S. with their two daughters last fortnight. His motive, if true, looked like Balzacian revenge. Valdés and the boy's lawyer-father had won Maria her divorce and custody of the two children...
...wing Hanns Eisler, composer of the battle song Komin-tern, it is not Mexican, but an ultrasophisticated mixture of Hindemith, Schönberg and Prokofieff. This was not the way Steinbeck had planned it. His first choice for composer was Mexico's famed Silvestre Revueltas, a man of Balzacian corpulence, Bohemian courses, and a gift for orchestration. At the climax of their negotiations the hard-drinking Revueltas-to Steinbeck's and Mexico's dismay -died at the unripe age of 40 years...
...THOU THE BRIDE-Christine Weston -Scribner ($2.50). A first novel, laid in Maine, plumb full of Balzacian characters: a violent-blooded patriarch, three bastards, two idiots, a miscellany of neurotics and misfits. In two generations their collective activities include a sex murder, several adulteries, a heap of frustrations and painful deaths, with only a gentle, all-forgiving girl named Fortune and leathery Grandmother Noakes to relieve the psychopathic shadows...