Word: exits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Book publishers rarely beg the government to prosecute a book for obscenity. But that is just about what the English firm of Calder & Boyars did early this year. The book was Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn, which had been banned in London's Soho district (TIME, Dec. 30). Under English custom, such local rulings tend to be honored throughout the country. Calder & Boyars decided that the only way to lift the ban was a full-scale trial, and the government finally agreed to prosecute. Said Publisher John Calder: "I'm sure we'll win before a jury...
Last week, to his astonishment, he lost. The jury unanimously found Exit obscene. In so doing, it crisply ignored the testimony of a number of literary lights who contended that the book was a near masterpiece that denounced the gutter by wallowing in it. Critic Frank Kermode, former co-editor of Encounter, argued that he "was horrified by it, but impressed by its novelty, originality and moral power. Dealing as it does with the lower depths of a great city, it is very much in the tradition of Dickens." Since Selby offered a minutely detailed chronicle of unremitting violence, perversion...
...William S. Burroughs supplies him with drugs, re-enters the sanitarium upon discovery, and finishes the cure. The film ends brilliantly with two scenes of Harwick--cured--leaving the sanitarium, expressing both the hallucinations of leaving the must have been the final visions of an almost-cured Rooks (he exits by helicopter and waves goodbye to himself, standing on the highest gable of the building), and the simpler reality of his actual exit by chauffeur-driven automobile...
...still in it a few days later. The door is open, no monsters lurk nearby, but half-crazed voices keep repeating--We can't escape! Before they do, two lovers commit suicide in a closet and everybody alternates between morphine peace and nightmares. The characters choose hell over free exit...
...second act got under way, her vocal lines became tangled with Soprano Nancy Tatum's in a tricky cabaletta, Si, fino all'ore, estreme; she reached for a high C, missed, and hid her face behind her arm in chagrin. A sour chorus of boos accompanied her exit. Suddenly, in the middle of the act, the lights went up again and the orchestra filed offstage, leaving the audience murmuring in confusion. Suliotis had asked for an unscheduled intermission in order to pull herself together-and let the audience cool down a bit. It must have worked. She returned...