Word: marquands
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Late George Apley. Ronald Colman and other skilled make-believe Bostonians in a pleasant adaption of J. P. Marquand's satire (TIME, March...
...John Marquand's sly satire of Bostonism takes still another dilution of commercialism in the film adaptation of a play that was a good novel. Progressively each of the interested parties have taken Marquand's Apley and twisted him into an inscrutable New England patriarch (the play) and now into a harmless old crone whose inner conflict is no greater than the woes of a lovelorn son and daughter. Not only is George Apley altered to fit the needs of non-New England audiences, but the aura of Beacon Hill and Louisburg Square is wrenched out of reality and transformed...
...Late George Apley (20th Century-Fox), as a J. P. Marquand novel, was a cleverly genteel variant on the water-drip torture. The story told, in deadpan style, of the gradual destructiveness of a whole mode of life. Like the play which was made from the novel, the movie sacrifices the subtleties of gradualism for dramatic frame and focus...
...good novels were as rare as vacant apartments. U.S. novelists had nothing to offer more controversial than Charles (Lost Weekend) Jackson's frank, unsubtle study of homosexuality, The Fall of Valor, nothing more successfully satirical than John Marquand's B. F.'s Daughter, nothing more socially rebellious than James T. Farrell's Bernard Clare, or Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters, a now-gamey-now-gooey protest against the kind of ad man he had been...
...Novelist Marquand never pins down the confusions that wreck rich Polly Fulton's marriage. Late in the book he tries: "The war had hardly touched them physically. So what was it within themselves that had vanished? It was fantastic to believe that all that two people had shared . . . could be turned and twisted, blown to nothing by a war." How the war had done it or why is hardly clearer to the reader than it is to Polly. One suspects that it is not too clear to Mr. Marquand either. B.F.'s Daughter, an unsatisfying novel, has none...