Word: heym
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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University Theater (Sat. 6:30 p.m., NBC). Stefan Heym's The Crusaders, with Cesar Romero...
...opportunists are distinguished from the people who believe in the war as a crusade (like Lieut. Yates or his friend Sergeant Bing) not because they do not know what they are fighting for, but because they do not need to know. Author Heym follows them through the liberation of Paris (barricade scenes, snipers, girls giving themselves to the conquerors in hotel rooms and in jeeps); through the Battle of the Bulge (scenes of slaughter at the front, the shooting of American prisoners); to the liberation of the first concentration camp (emaciated prisoners, panic-stricken Nazis, the guards killed...
Idealists. The believers in Author Heym's crusade are a long way from Richard the Lion-Hearted. Yates is hesitant and unsure of himself, even when his suspicions of Willoughby and Loomis have been proved; Bing is youthful and selfconscious. It is almost a matter of blind luck that the guilty are at last found out, and that a kind of rough justice triumphs...
...Author Heym's uncertainty with American idiom and American psychology is frequently apparent. His prose is surprisingly matter of fact and informal for an acquired language, but it is nevertheless flat and lacks any quality of suspense. Americans are not likely to think of themselves as having worked for "the great chemical trust." They are not likely to say to a girl in the morning: "The night was in your face." They would not characterize a Nazi: "[He] belonged to the strata of activists." The characters have a constant consciousness of position, prestige and appearances that Americans...
...Crusaders is interesting for its scope, for the ambition that Author Heym reveals, for his boldness in attempting a major work, and for the odd foreign quality, sometimes engaging, of his observations. But The Crusaders would need much more to justify the praise that the booksellers have given...