Word: hellman
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...this anthology Playwright Lillian Hellman, who shared and sheltered many of Hammett's years, has contributed an introduction that pays sentimental homage to his talent. She has also included the fragment of a serious novel, undertaken late in Hammett's life and never published before. There is just enough of it to suggest that the author did his creative spirit a disservice in confining it to literature's underworld...
...Chase is a shockworn message film, smoothly overacted and top-heavy with subtle bigotry, expertly exploiting the violence, intolerance and mean provincialism that it is supposed to be preaching against. Taking a Horton Foote novel adapted by Playwright Lillian Hellman, Producer Sam Spiegel (Lawrence of Arabia) hired Director Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker) to whip up a scathing, lopsided indictment of a small town somewhere in Texas. With Star Marlon Brando as chief jeer-leader, the movie smugly points an accusing finger at all the wrong, wrong deeds done by precisely the right people...
Ignorant Texans are the targets, and Scenarist Hellman blows the lid off a snake pit of contemporary evil when the town's bad boy, Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), escapes from prison and heads home to settle scores among a scroungy lot of drunken, wife-swapping, white-collar workers who carry their pistols to parties of a Saturday night. "Shoot a man for sleepin' with someone's wife?" cries a roundheeled young matron, Janice Rule. "Half the town 'ud be wiped out." Poor Bubber's Mama (Miriam Hopkins), cast as Parental Guilt, hysterically accepts blame...
Chase has very few dull moments, nor does it lack the courage to cash in on its convictions, most of which are half-truths deftly rigged to attract liberal non-thinkers. Miss Hellman seldom lets a scene end without tacking on her comment; except for a handful of courageous, long-suffering Negroes and Sheriff Brando, no Texan escapes being singed by a Statement. Brando ably plays the stereotyped champion of human rights that he seems compelled to endorse in film after film, changing only his dialect. Bloody, brutally beaten by local louts, he makes a final, desperate attack against prejudice...
...island, on a point of land called West Chop, some of the homes have been in the same family for generations. Such luminaries as Katharine Cornell, James Cagney, Thomas Hart Benton, Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman have long summered among the island's rolling moors and scrub pine. Small cottages rent for from $100 to $150 for each person per week during the season, and better furnished or better located houses run considerably higher. One lucky schoolteacher who pays $135 a month for the house during the winter months sublets it for $1,000 a month during the summer...