Word: goncourts
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...Jules Dassin (Rififi, Never on Sunday), who both wrote and directed the film, deserves full credit. Unfortunately, Moviemaker Dassin must also bear most of the blame for the rest, which is mildly but consistently awful. Adapted crudely from La Loi, Roger Vailland's fine Prix Goncourt novel of 1957, Hot Wind is laden with too many big European names (Gina Lollobrigida, Marcello Mastroianni, Pierre Brasseur, Paolo Stoppa, in addition to Montand and Mercouri). When not glumly stumbling over each other or aggressively hogging the camera, the actors all seem loyally determined to play down to Actress Lollobrigida...
This first novel, a quasi-epic panorama of Jewish suffering from medieval pogroms to Nazi crematories, is a publishing phenomenon in France. The Goncourt Academy last year held an unprecedentedly early meeting to give the book its prestigious award, ahead of other eager prize committees. Running at a 10,000-copy-a-month clip, sales have risen to the 400,000 mark, a rare bestselling figure in the U.S. but almost unheard of in France. Translations are appearing or due to appear in 17 countries...
...Possessors (Filmsonor Intermondia: Lopert) are all members of one big unhappy family who made their first appearance in Maurice Druon's Les Grandes Families, a 1948 Prix Goncourt novel based on some of the Two Hundred Families that presumably ruled France between the two World Wars...
...frank eroticism of Fragonard's art, it is almost never vulgar. "His decency," said the brothers De Goncourt, "consists in the lightness of his touch." That seductive decency illuminated an exhibition of French drawings at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum last week which featured Fragonard. His Fireworks, as the De Goncourts noted, has "an unrivaled deftness ... its sparks darting here and there, upon a shoulder or a thigh, flickering all over the bed of the three charming heroines of the picture...
...PRIX GONCOURT. Hardly anyone had heard of the winning book, Saint-Germain, ou la Negotiation, before the award was announced, but the prize assures a sale of 100,000 copies. Written by Francis Walder, a retired Belgian artillery officer turned minor diplomat, Saint-Germain is a diplomat's reconstruction of the negotiations that led up to the peace of Saint-Germain, the temporary truce between French Huguenots and French Catholics before the St. Bartholomew Massacre of 1572. "One can understand his wanting to write the book," sniffed one critic who struggled through it, "but what one cannot understand...