Word: haras
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...movie industry seems to take a perverse delight in making bad films out of bad books by John O'Hara. O'Hara obligingly has kept Hollywood copiously supplied with his bedroom comedies, and through the years such flaming failures as From the Terrace have burst upon the increasingly unenthusiastic American public with marvelous regularity...
...shame, however, that one of O'Hara's few good novels had to be manhandled the way Butter-field 8 has been--although the catastrophe might be attributed to force of habit. For Butterfield 8 is one of the truly great chronicles of the 1930's. Unlike the more recent O'Hara offerings, it is not filled with drooly bedroom scenes and lurid prose; rather, it is a sympathetic study of Gloria Wandrous and of the kind of age that could produce such a girl...
Miss Taylor is, after all, a competent actress, and she does at times bring to the role of Gloria Wandrous something of the spirit of O'Hara's book. But Mr. Harvey is a totally unbelievable Weston Liggett. He speaks with a muted British accent, which may be intended to sound like Old Yale, but doesn't and he looks as though he were still in Room at the Top. It is inconceivable that any girl would waste a week touring the East's better morels with such an out-and-out spineless creep as Mr. Harvey portrays...
Butterfield 8. The crude but affecting tart's tragedy of the O'Hara novel has become a sleek and libidinous lingerie meller -featuring Elizabeth Taylor as an enthusiastic amateur...
...this statement suggests, Novelist O'Hara is not one of those few who can function in the ooze of the soul's floor; he works best at middle depth, and in a story composed mostly of dialogue, that is where he must stay. It is not a bad place for any writer...