Word: epical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Friendly Persuasion (Anthony Perkins; Epic). A movie tune with lyrics in Quaker lingo ("Thee is mine . . . thee pleasures me") that make the canny Quakers look pretty silly. It has a mighty purty tune, by that old Quaker from Russia, Dimitri Tiomkin...
...Magnificent Seven (Toho; Columbia). Arms and the men have seldom been more stirringly sung than in this tale of bold emprise in old Nippon. In his latest film, Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon) has plucked the epic string. And though at times, in the usual Japanese fashion, some dismal flats and rather hysterical sharps can be heard, the lay of this Oriental minstrel has a martial thrum and fervor that should be readily understood even in those parts of the world that do not speak the story's language. Violence, as Kurosawa eloquently speaks it, is a universal language...
...screenwriter Nunnally Johnson tried to recreate the book's impact by quite faithfully transcribing the original story and dialogue. Grapes of Wrath uses the Joads to exemplify the poor, Southwest farm family "tractored-off" their land by the big operators and forced west to California. The movie captures the epic quality of this last major westward migration, and the frightened hatred of the Californians towards these people...
These Thousand Hills is A. B. Guthrie's third, and least successful, novel in his multi-volume attempt to chronicle fictionally the epic of Western America's development. His first, The Big Sky, was an account of mountain fur trappers in the 1830's. The Way West, which won Guthrie the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, depicted the westward trek of Lije Evans and his wagon train to Oregon...
...soldiers' story, often under fire. Early in the Korean war 'he took leave of the Detroit News, to analyze the new enemy's unfamiliar techniques. Out of this experience came Marshall's best book, The River and the Gauntlet (TIME, June i, 1953), an epic description of the Eighth Army's 1950 defeat by the inrushing Chinese Communist masses...