Word: fadeouts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Location is as important to detective fiction as it is to the real estate business. The glitz centers of the Sunbelt offer the irresistible drama of drug traffic played against a background of pastel, stucco and palm fronds. Joseph Hansen (Fadeout, A Smile in His Lifetime, Gravedigger) offers an alternative to the macho, down-at-the-heels stereotype. He is David Brandstetter, a Southern California insurance investigator who is affluent, well dressed and homosexual. This subgenre is bicoastal; see George Baxt's novels, beginning with A Queer Kind of Death. The protagonist is a gay New York City police detective...
...funeral of his unbeloved mother and sets out on a three-day debauch that ends in the psychosomatic equivalent of a heart attack. That is not, perhaps, the stuff of box-office comedy, and, as a portrait of Hollywood, it seems less satire than neorealism. Yet by the final fadeout, Josh Greenfeld's novel turns out to be both uproariously funny and bitter as wormwood...
...justice to these epics, Griffith, as much as any one man, devised the primary techniques of film. The closeup, the fadeout, cross-cutting-all developed on his set. But Schickel provides a lively argument for Griffith as poet as well as technician. Through the famous storms and battle scenes, the director seemed to be trying to find his own way back to a lost innocence...
Maas offers no happy fadeout with right restored and virtue intact. Marie Ragghianti today is a political pariah; no politician wants to hire the woman who brought down a Governor. She is a teacher of criminology at a Florida community college, consoling herself with the meditations of a stoic: "Have I done something for the general interest? Well, then, I have had my reward." Maas' forensic style and vigorous tempo are ideally suited to Marie's story. The author makes clear that his knowledge of feminine determination is derived from experience. His late wife, Audrey Gellen Maas...
...world's most successful director. In the Palais des Festivals he heard applause erupt throughout the screening and watched an audience of grim professionals laugh and cry after two weeks of wheeling and dealing. During the last minute of the film, the applause kept growing until the fadeout, when an exaltation of bravos enveloped Spielberg as if Pavarotti and not a 3-ft. 6-in. spaceman were ascending into the heavens. The Cannes elite, happy to see its convention end on a note of triumph, seemed ready to elect Spielberg President of France. -By Richard Corliss