Word: good
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lady pictures the how of a gambler's obsession with a good deal of plausibility. Especially skillful are Barbara Stanwyck's hard-breathing, glitter-eyed performance at the gaming tables, and Russell Metty's feverish camera work in & out of the neon-lighted dens of Las Vegas. The story gets added strength from Stephen McNally's interpretation of a gambler who, for once, appears to be an intelligent character...
...reformed, horse-loving outlaw (Howard Duff) who meets up with the pretty daughter (Ann Blyth) of a rich, horse-racing rancher (George Brent). Howard is out to capture a wild horse. Ann, despite some flimsy pretenses to the contrary, is bent on catching a tame husband. After a good deal of shooting, roping and racing, and without offending either the S.P.C.A. or the Johnston Office, both of them get what they are after...
...crowd, people chatted quietly. Old Man Warner snorted when he heard that folks in the north village were thinking of giving up the lottery. "Pack of crazy fools . . . nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves...
Unfortunately, nothing else in The Lottery is as good. The other 24 pieces are brightly lacquered sketches trimmed to New Yorker specifications-deadpan, passionless portraits of cruel children, quietly miserable spinsters, clumsy middle-class drifters, city people lonely in the country. Shirley Jackson accumulates little piles of irrelevant detail, topples them over with the expected sardonic swipe. If she could break out of this mold, she might become one of the U.S.'s best short-story writers...
Only six of the 25 children she studied ever let off emotional steam through the safety valve of temper tantrum. They were "good children" who bottled up their emotions, cracked up later when they were about to finish school and face the world. Vienna-trained Dr. Tietze did not live to see her report published; on May 7, she died, at 39, from cancer...