Word: gallico
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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THOMASINA (288 pp.)-Paul Gallico-Doubleday...
...Paul Gallico has written a highly sentimental novel about a cat-and there is no one quite so sentimental as a 200-lb. ex-sportswriter (a type who can weep real tears over a carload of redundant wrestlers). Gallico's cat Thomasina should go down in literary history as an outstanding example of the pathetic fallacy, i.e., the attribution of human emotions to nonhuman objects. There are whole libraries of books that follow the fallacy like blind bird dogs-books about elephants, Teddy bears, toads, and even, in one notorious case (E. B. White's Stuart Little), mice...
Ginger-colored Thomasina is the pet of a vet named Andrew MacDhui in a little Scottish town called Inveranoch. Thomasina is actually part-narrator of this book. She is a guid Scots puss and purrs with a burr; before Author Gallico is through with the unfortunate beast she does everything but carry a Harry Lauder cane and sing I Love a Lassie...
...Gallico's plot is intricate, skillful, absurd. The vet, a big red-bearded man, really hates other people's pets because his wife has died. His little daughter dotes on pets but specially on Thomasina. Coldly the vet orders aged pets chloroformed, but away in the glens there lives a mad witch who has a silver "Bell of Mercy'' hung on a great oak tree. When small boys ring the bell and bring frogs with broken legs to her door she restores them to health. Comes the day when the hardhearted vet orders Thomasina...
...unblinking eye for "neo-realism." But the effort never moved very smoothly: De Sica, who likes to use nonprofessionals in his films and speaks poor English, frequently found his American stars hard to deal with. The original Italian script was worked over successively by American Authors Carson McCullers, Paul Gallico and Truman Capote. For U.S. distribution, Selznick cut the picture by nearly a third (90 to 64 minutes). He took out a lot of local sidelights, e.g., a boisterous Italian wedding party and some realistic lovemaking. Says Director De Sica: "I cannot pass judgment . . . Perhaps Selznick cut a little...