Word: botched
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...Botch-a-me (Rosemary Clooney; Columbia). Another piece of bumptiousness ("botch-a-me" is Tin-Pan-Alley Italian for "kiss me") from the girl who made Come On-a My House a limited national delirium last summer. No better than most sequels...
...wenching to eat her beetle puddings under the Weird Oak Tree. She gave her mistress' daughter the dread effigy of St. Uncumber-to whom unwilling wives prayed that he uncumber them of their mates-and when the poor husband failed to die, cast on him the botch of leprosy. She died at last in the lord's dungeons, suffocating herself by packing her nose with earth and swallowing her lips...
...fact was that many a good novel, even when kindly reviewed, was far from being a moneymaker. Apart from book-club distribution, only about three or four novels sold more than 100,000 copies. Many young writers seemed to be aiming for the popular market and making a botch of it, or trying to build novels out of private despairs and ending by being precious bores. For the first time since it was set up in 1922, the Harper Prize ($10,000, richest in the U.S.) was not awarded. Of the 599 manuscripts considered, only two were judged even worth...
...addition: the charming playboy was mourned as a great writer who had tragically dissipated his talent. To some intellectuals, the Fitzgerald story seemed the perfect prop to bolster a shaky thesis: that the U.S. is culturally too anemic to nourish its good writers. By implication, Fitzgerald's dipsomaniacal botch of his life derived from and was part of the national botch...
...result, though sometimes good talk and sometimes good purple theater, is a kind of botch. The violence is not too surprising; as a satirist, Huxley has always liked to draw blood and leave welts. But beyond that, like many essentially critical talents seeking to be creative, he goes to extremes, and overcreates; when he isn't being literary, he is being lurid. And here, without the armor of style, he lunges out with every rusty saber of theatricalism. The Gioconda smile is rather a maniacal laugh. And the production-with Basil Rathbone hamming as the husband and Valerie Taylor...