Word: gifts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gift of Love. The film's slightly academic tone may be a reflection of its origins. Six years ago, Truffaut read a biography of Victor Hugo's younger daughter Adele, which was based largely on her coded diaries. The movie is a scrupulous adaptation and elaboration of Adele's strange history. Adele, haunted by the death of her older sister Leopoldine-her father's favorite-followed a British lieutenant, Albert Pinson, to his post in Nova Scotia. She had fallen in love with Pinson during her father's political exile in Guernsey, and even broke...
...Adele became a woman possessed. At first she claimed to be Pinson's cousin. Then, finding him, she begged and threatened, even offered him money to pay his debts. She stalked him on rendezvous with other women, sent him a whore for the night as a gift of her love, dressed as a man in evening clothes to track him down at a fancy ball, wrecked his engagement to another woman. During this time she endured hysterical nightmares of Leopoldine's drowning. She kept Leopoldine's jewels in a box and wore one of her dresses...
Knef in particular does not need this asinine counsel. As The Verdict and her earlier memoir The Gift Horse show, she has pursued life and love with fierce energy all of her 50 years. She is one of Germany's best-known actresses, a performer in 54 films, including Silk Stockings and Decision Before Dawn in Hollywood...
...Gift Horse (1971) revealed that she could have been a writer as well, perhaps even a novelist. Although that book contains a fine, stringent recollection of Hollywood, it is best about the war. Knef had a wretched time of it, usually hungry and sick, falling in love with Nazis and Jews, shuttling across constantly altering boundaries. The secret of her style then and now lies in its immediacy...
HUMBOLDT'S GIFT by Saul Bellow. An obscure old poet dies and his onetime protege suffers in this seriocomic meditation by a major American writer on the value of art and the price of success...