Word: hartogs
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...Hartog's 1951 comedy-drama,* on which the picture is based, was a theatrical tour de force that capitalized on the physical limitations of the stage. But on the expansive screen, it becomes a motion picture with a minimum of motion and a maximum of sugary sentiment. The result is a fourposter that often creaks and sags. England's suave Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, his real-life wife, play their parts smoothly, though they sometimes seem over-sophisticated for the homey couple they are supposed to be. The picture owes nothing to the stage original...
...flood tide of such salty works as Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us and Under the Sea Wind, Nicholas Monsarrat's novel of convoys battling The Cruel Sea, and Commander Edward L. Beach's Submarine! The latest sample of the true brine is Jan de Hartog's The Distant Shore, a Literary Guild selection for September...
Author De Hartog, a sure-enough seafaring man, began his nautical career at ten, got to be a brass polisher on an Amsterdam tugboat. He polished up his languages too-so well that he is now the author of a bestselling novel in Dutch and a current Broadway play, The Fourposter, in English...
Meanwhile, he saw service in World War II on the rescue tugs covering the western approaches to Britain. The first and best half of Author De Hartog's new novel is set in these troubled waters. His hero is the skipper of one of the "suicide" tugs that stole out virtually unarmed (in the early days of the war, Britain had no guns to spare), to rescue disabled stragglers of the convoys from the prowling wolf packs of the German undersea fleet. The U-boats sometimes let the lame ducks stay afloat in order to get a shot...
...Distant Shore, especially in its second half, is definitely outclassed by the destroyer-escorts and transports whose course it will cross in the fiction lists. But Author De Hartog's prose is polished, and he knows how to tell a tale of men and ships...