Word: clef
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...PLACE, by William Brammer. Hardly noticed when it was first published in 1961, this first novel by a sometime aide to Lyndon Johnson has become a top-selling paperback and a political conversation piece. Deservedly, for despite fictional camouflage it is an adroitly written roman a clef about L.B.J. in the days when he was ringmaster of the U.S. Senate...
Though the play contains much of universal relevance, it is also to a large extent a piece a clef. Quentin is obviously Miller himself. The work thus is a significant autobiographical document, and takes its place alongside O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (although it lacks the sustained power of the O'Neill work...
...teen-age girl, charmingly played by Julia Lockwood (daughter of Actress Margaret), writes a scandalous bestseller called Naked Revolt, and the whole town plays the guessing game of matching members of the author's family with their racy counterparts in what is taken to be a roman á clef...
...loyal lifelong employees waiting for the last Trumpet to sound. On Author White s showing, it is hard to see why they were ever hired. The managing editor is a choleric refugee from The Front Page, whose English is baser than basic ("Crapola! Crapola! Crapola!"). As a roman a clef, or key-to-reality-novel, the book unlocks some fairly intriguing trade gossip. But as literature. View from the Fortieth Floor lacks a consistent viewpoint, simply upends a wastebasket of facts and scans the litter like tea leaves of doom...
...sound tracks of such uncertain musical bets as Mogambo, The Pride and the Passion, Hot Rod Rumble. By and large, present-day studio composers seem a trifle more sophisticated than the practitioners of "Micky Mouse" music in the '30s, when whole orchestras simply hurtled into the bass clef when a character tumbled downstairs. Columbia's The Bridge on the River Kwai, by British Composer Malcolm Arnold, skillfully melds its bellowing brasses and shivering strings with such traditional military airs as the Colonel Bogey March in a score long on pomp, short on circumstance. RCA Victor's Bonjour...