Word: dreamland
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Many an English middle-class family, caught in the business end of the economic nutcracker, has been dreaming of a freer, easier life in South Africa. Novelist Lessing, who was reared there, has bad news about their dreamland. Her story describes the spiritual defeat of a misfit couple in their war with the harsh realities of the veld. Few writers have succeeded so well in getting its thorny unkindness and its head-splitting heat down on paper, and few have written more devastatingly about the dream of living an easy European life against the harsh African grain...
...Omaha, where she was in the midst of a cross-country tour last week, a happy doorman at the Dreamland Ballroom nodded close to 1,000 frenzied Little Esther fans through the door-several hundred more than fire regulations call for. Dressed in demure organdy, roly-poly Little Esther herself had to step over a circle of backstage crapshooters to get onstage. Once there, she flashed a big gold tooth into the spotlight. Bandleader Johnny Otis laid down a fat and winsome chord, and Little Esther cut her big, warm, billowing voice adrift on a blues...
...over the inevitable slow spots. It bogs and badly after starting off at a tremendous clip. The middle reels, where any normally intelligent gagman would be clearing the decks for a final smashing boffola, are gummed up by a miserably dull jail routine that talks the audience straight into dreamland. And they sleep right on through to the bitter end. Cary Grant stars opposite Hepburn and is charming and funny as always. Katherine Hepburn has sinus trouble...
...further pointed up by the fact that the other writers in this book deliberately turn their backs on it. André Gide and Noel Devaulx hide their talented heads in reminiscences of life before World War I. Nature-Boys Jean Giono and André Chamson wallow in a woody dreamland of hefty peasants and prime wine. Only Jean Cassou gives an impression of both vitality and veracity. His macabre story is an up-to-date version of Romeo & Juliet, in which Juliet ("a nice, retiring person . . . the sort who hates being conspicuous") is put to shame by the amorous frenzy...
John Moore's studies of men and manners in the Cotswolds, as presented in Brensham Village and its predecessor The Fair Field (TIME, Dec. 9, 1946), will do for the U.S. reader what Hollywood did for Lord Orris-transport him into an overseas dreamland whose main charm is its remoteness from everyday life. Just as the romantic "reporting" of H. L. Mencken makes old Baltimore a place of "happy days," so does Author Moore's accomplished imagination remove his rural Englishmen as far from mediocre reality as Falstaff and Prince Hal are from the men in the Kinsey...