Word: birnam
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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John Grandin is an even more sympathetic figure than the Don Birnam of Lost Weekend fame. For Birnam, there was hope-and Alcoholics Anonymous. For Grandin, nothing. I have traveled extensively and have met many souls kindred to John Grandin. For them, there is nought but continual suffering -unless they choose to become the recipients of the total disgust of their fellowmen...
Charles Jackson's first novel, The Lost Weekend, was the story of five days in the life of a lost soul, Don Birnam, a confirmed and hopeless alcoholic unable to save himself or see any way to be saved. It was a study in acknowledged disorder. The Fall of Valor, Jackson's second book, is a study in the revelation of disorder. The story follows a conventionally successful man, John Grandin, through the crucial weeks of his life, when his long-growing sense that something is wrong gives way to the shock of realizing that...
...choosing this theme Author Jackson has ruled out the chance of any such popular success as he had with his first novel. It is not a theme that even the brashest of moviemakers will rush to handle, and readers who found Don Birnam a sympathetic figure are not likely to have any such fellow feeling for John Grandin. Many readers who got a wallop out of Weekend will have to judge Valor on its literary merit alone, and they will find it medium-to-poor...
Divorced. By Joan Crawford, 38, cinemactress, recent recipient of an Oscar (for Mildred Pierce): her third husband, Philip Terry, 36, supporting-role cinemactor (Don Birnam's brother in The Lost Weekend); after nearly four years of marriage, no children; in Los Angeles...
...fine Austrian hand which is responsible for the picture's most memorable moments--Birnam's organized, stumbling search down New York's Third Avenue in search of an open pawn shop, the nightmarish scene of delirium in Bellevue's alcholic ward, Birnam's whirling crash down a whole flight of stairs...