Word: halliday
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Stream of Sensuousness. For years, critics skimmed the dazzling prose surface of Hemingway and harped on his tough-guy realism. In one of those flat-out statements that sometimes herald a major critical about-face, at least one U.S. critic, North Carolina State's E. M. Halliday, recently called Hemingway essentially a philosophical writer. His was, of course, never a formal but a sort of visceral philosophy. But though he was leary of metaphysical systems, Hemingway was really on a metaphysical quest. Without the customary marks of the intellectual, in fact often called anti-intellectual, he was nevertheless...
...Monkey Business which has just concluded a special one-day run at the Brattle was not the Marx Brothers movie of the same name which Halliday and Harvey thought they were buying, but an entirely different film about a chimpanzee who discovers a chemical formula that makes Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers act like ten-year-olds...
...Disenchanted (by Budd Schulberg and Harvey Breit) treats of Manley Halliday, who. if not wholly Scott Fitzgerald, is very much his blood brother. It treats of him, in a running narrative, in defeat; it shows him, by way of flashbacks, in decline. The razzle-dazzle days of the '20s, the champagne-bath marriage to an irresistible playmate and a hopelessly irresponsible wife, the dropping of bank notes like confetti, have left a writer as drained as his bank account. To get money enough to go on with a book, he agrees to work on a Hollywood film about college...
...sets to work-it is 1939-with a younger Depression-age writer who has admired Halliday's books but quarreled with his values. But beyond having no stomach for short-order hackwork, Halliday has no resources. Daystpass in California and New York as he fishes for ideas in water that has gone over the dam, as he tosses crumpled typewriter paper after crumpled memories, as he struggles against a deadline that is indeed an obituary...
With Jason Robards Jr. impressive as a collapsing standard bearer for his era and vocation, and with George Grizzard excellent as the younger writer, the main narrative has many moments, such as Halliday's proud roll call of Jazz Age names, that are vibrantly nostalgic, as it has others, such as Halliday's white-knuckled attempt to summarize a scenario that has never been written, that are tensely moving. Elsewhere, at times, the main story is wordy and under-dramatized. Despite Rosemary Harris' period appeal as the wife, the flashbacks seem inadequate, do more to catch...