Word: hara
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Jamaica Inn is the somewhat free rending of Daphne Du Maurier's best-seller of the same name. It tells about the few but feverish days Mary Yellen (lank, pale-faced, sloe-eyed Maureen O'Hara) passed with her Aunt Patience at a creepy Cornish inn, until kidnapped by Squire Pengallon who later jumps from a yardarm, kills himself...
...actors, and produced one of the best pictures of the year. The flamboyance of Laughton and the high-strung tension of Hitchcock direction complement each other perfectly. The result is high adventure worthy of Dumas combined with the trip-hammer pace of a first-rate detective story. Maureen O'Hara, Laughton's much-heralded colleen, is not, however, the sensation that one might expect. While she is admirable as a wide-eyed adventuress, it is hard to imagine her as a big-time all-around actress,--but then, you never can tell...
...this second collection O'Hara has written his first Foreword, a modest, touchy acknowledgment of his pleasure in other people's short stories and in his own. Then there are 35 stories in which the reader meets, briefly but none too briefly, about twice that many strictly American heels. Some are heels because they are young and dumb, some because they are trapped and tired. Some are pure heels, like the prep schoolteacher who enjoys frightening a 13-year-old boy. The Hollywood heels are the worst, comprising several of O'Hara's most excruciating women...
...Hara's moral scheme is dependable as far as it goes. But his writing is limited by the excellence of his dislikes. His ear for heeltalk is so mercilessly accurate that some of the stories depend on that alone (e.g., "But one night Bernette happened to get a load of Peggy doing a rumba with Jackie, and from then on. See what I mean? Isn't she marvelous? She's really primitive."). The company so neatly evoked, is a company whose average intelligence rises only slightly above the threshold of human consciousness...
...bare, observant technique draws attention to itself and to its occasional flaws (the story Trouble in 1949 hinges on an exchange of car keys for which the author makes no provision). Possibly two prides-the Irishman's and the craftsman's-conspire to allow O'Hara no ambitious flops. But readers who are not reporters will wonder how anyone can write so well and yet so rarely try to write better...