Word: haras
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HELLBOX (210 pp.)-John O'Hara- Random House...
...hellbox, as the publishers helpfully note on the jacket, is the place where printers throw broken type. These 26 stories by John O'Hara (an Old Newspaperman himself) have the neat and durable ring of O'Hara's best writing. They also have O'Hara's special effect of making the reader feel he has bitten something brassy. To O'Hara's hopeful admirers the stories may look like 26 more notes for the novel they think he ought to write-and, from that point of view, wasted sticks of type...
...book is a hellbox in a wider sense: about two-thirds of the stories record brief episodes of evil. O'Hara is an expert at ugly moments, probably the best expert in contemporary U.S. writing. Like many of his stones, these have such painful audibility that they make life itself seem an ugly moment unduly prolonged. The figures in his Inferno are mainly Broadway, Hollywood and resort people with a few professional criminals thrown...
There are a few sympathetic characters and some quiet, even funny, stories. Moreover, in exploiting his vicious subjects, O'Hara implicitly exposes and condemns them. Kindness, fidelity and honesty are rarely portrayed-and of course never mentioned by name-but their rarity makes them all the pleasanter when encountered. Meanwhile O'Hara extracts all the flavor to be found in the manners and talk of U.S. types who have been hurt and hardened in a corrupt world...
There is no really had acting in the movie: it's all standard, mass-produced, with always the right gesture or tone of voice for the right emotion, all as dull as the day-before-yesterday's newspaper. Maureen O'Hara is as bosomy an example of pretty American girlhood as one could wish; Cornel Wilde is a fine young man, ambitious, though a little wild; while the minor characters could be transferred to another such movie as easily as a Ford part can be replaced. At best, they bustle through the plot using the lowest common denominator of human...