Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Packed with drama and feeling, Lillian Hellman's plays meet their grim situations headon. A moralist, not a misanthrope, Playwright Hellman ferrets out evil and malice not to wallow in them but to flay them alive. Witty, sociable, personally far from stern, Lillian Hellman is happiest while lazing through an amphibian summer on an island off Connecticut, with such friends as Dorothy Parker (who suggested the title for The Little Foxes), Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Kober. But today, awake to the troubled world around her, Lillian Hellman loafs seldom. Militantly antifascist, she two years ago spent a month under bombardment...
...which she traces to the ominous state of the world, particularly as reflected in the spread of fascism and antiSemitism. But she cannot decide whether she or the world has gone in the wrong direction; whether she has not been serious enough, or whether the world has grown too grim. In one breath she confesses that her novels sold well because they were escapist. In another breath she accuses readers, and particularly critics (who ignore her books' "sound sociological basis"), of not taking them seriously enough. She kisses her hand to luck, thinks So Big became a best-seller...
Alcatraz Penitentiary on a grim, grey rock in San Francisco Bay was considered escape proof till December 1937. Then two convicts got down to the water, vanished into what may or may not have been their grave in the treacherous currents of the bay. Then authority were startled. They were more startled last week...
...Faulkner been content to let The Wild Palms rest with the convict's story, the book might have become a classic of involuntary adventure. It is a pulsing, racing story, a kind of hysterical Huckleberry Finn, its humor at once grotesque and shrewd, its moral at once grim and humane. The convict, with his thoughtless courage, his exasperation at the titanic forces unleashed against him, is Faulkner's most original and attractive character. And the whole book is conceived in the grand manner. Faulkner makes you feel the terrible fragility of man's levees, boats, prisons, other...
...Gentle People (by Irwin Shaw; produced by The Group Theatre). Usually propaganda plays are grim, clenched, bellicose. But the social message of Irwin Shaw's "Brooklyn fable" is as softly conveyed as a woman's "Yes." The Gentle People is the story of two benevolent middle-aged cronies down Coney Island way who love to fish of an evening. A tough young gangster (Franchot Tone) extorts "protection money" from them. He seduces one man's daughter (Sylvia Sidney). At length he demands their savings. Their patience pushed too far, the outraged cronies decide to drown their tormentor...