Word: blakely
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...BENJAMIN BLAKE - Edison Marshall-Farrar & Rinehart...
This week Edison Marshall, a ranking adventure serialist, moves into the field of the legitimate novel and gets the Literary Guild's accolade for March. Benjamin Blake has everything a best-seller needs: an alliterative title, a fat part for Tyrone Power when it reaches the films, and the ingredients of what critics like to call a rattling good yarn. It is set in the 18th Century, sauced with its political restiveness, and skillfully served up in a fake-archaic, first-person prose that has fibre enough to support a novel twice as serious...
Chief humiliator is Uncle Arthur Blake, Squire of Breetholm Manor, who takes his elder brother's by-blow into service, spends a futile year trying to break his spirit. Benjamin beats him to a pulp, boards a Boston ship, is marooned for seven years on a South Pacific paradise...
...picked up pearls which, in London, net him all the King's Pardoning he needs, and thousands of pounds sterling into the bargain. The ending is technically happy but, like the treatment throughout, perceptibly tougher and more intelligent than such stories generally bother to be. Indeed Benjamin Blake turns out to be not merely an engaging adventure piece but an articulate tract against feudalism, both sexual and social...
...Clarence A. Warden. The Academy paid Composer Nordoff all it could afford-$200-for 25 minutes of music, and he threw in a dozen extra minutes gratis. His tricky rhythms, his obstinate tunes might have stumped an even more experienced company, but the Academy singers-notably pretty Soprano Doris Blake-and a small orchestra under Conductor Vernon Hammond pulled into the final cadence without a grind or a bump. The Masterpiece (libretto by Franklin Brewer) told, with a few leers, about how an artist and his wife sell a picture to a dealer and his wife. Best of four...