Word: godden
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There is hardly a novel in the English language which offers more difficulties to the movie producer than "The River," Rumer Godden's beautiful and deeply sensitive story of a girl's adolescence in India. Adolescence is rocky stuff for the movies anyway--it is all inside while the camera is necessarily outside. And in the case of "The River," the exotic background might well be a distraction...
...story and become a travelogue; his adolescents often seem remote from the local color through which they move. The nuances of the connection between character and background are not all caught--as they were in the production a few years ago of "Black Narcissus," the other of Miss Godden's novels to be filmed...
...River (Oriental-International; United Artists] is a thoroughly unconventional movie and a very good one. It rises out of Rumer Godden's autobiographical novel (1946) about an English girl growing up beside a holy river in India. Directed by France's Jean (Grand Illusion) Renoir, who wrote the script with Novelist Godden, and produced entirely in India by a Hollywood florist named Kenneth McEldowney, it is a sensitive, Technicolored record of youthful growing pains, enriched by a poetic perspective of life and a wealth of Indian sights & sounds...
Serving the Young. Since Author Godden has sifted out most of Shakespeare's minor personages and their minuscule schemes, and has even subtracted the leading motive of revenge from the main character, there is no large action in A Breath of Air. The story sits still as a Pacific island; yet it is almost as hard for the reader's eye to look away from it as for the sun to blink...
...fascination lies largely in Author Godden's Ariel-light prose, for her island is notably barren of ideas. The leading idea of the volume is, in fact, just an old coconut: youth will be served, and old age must do the serving. The Book-of-the-Month Club has decided to let its subscribers crack that one in February...