Word: dreiser
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Carrie. Polished movie version of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, with Jennifer Jones and Laurence Olivier as star-crossed lovers. (TIME, June...
Carrie. Polished movie version of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, with Jennifer Jones and Laurence Olivier as star-crossed lovers (TIME, June...
Carrie (Paramount) brings Theodore Dreiser's massive, muddy, turn-of-the-century novel, Sister Carrie, to the screen for the first time* in a polished, rather tidied-up movie version. The film is generally faithful to Dreiser's story about Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones), an innocent farm girl who comes to Chicago in 1898 and gets involved with two men: Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert), a good-natured traveling salesman with whom she lives, and George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier), a prosperous restaurant manager who gives up family and career for her, and ends up a bum and a suicide...
...also some of its biting naturalism and sociological compassion. Hurstwood's suicide is only suggested in the film. Gone entirely is the harrowing trolley-car strike in which the down & out Hurstwood worked as a strikebreaking conductor; and almost all the flophouse and begging sequences have been deleted. Dreiser set off his small people with large philosophizing about the moral hypocrisy of the times, but the movie is mostly just about small people. Although it hews to Dreiser's somber story with honesty and artistry, Carrie lacks the novel's richly realistic "tangle of human life...
...years that followed, the magazines they co-edited (Smart Set and the American Mercury) introduced or helped to foster such notables as James Joyce, Aldous Huxley. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O'Neill. They also became trademarks of the "lost generation" along with hot jazz, bobbed hair and the hip flask. Mencken lashed out at the "booboisie" with a bull whip; the debonair Nathan was content to use a swizzle stick. In the eyes of the proper-minded, the two iconoclasts were unholy terrors. A couplet of those days went...