Word: novel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Sons (by Arthur Miller; produced by Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan & Walter Fried, in association with Herbert H. Harris) has a theatrical force that covers a multitude of sins. Playwright Miller (best known for his novel, Focus) tends to overload his plot and overheat his atmosphere. His writing is uneven, some of his main characters are sometimes unreal, and most of his minor characters are at all times unnecessary. But he combines enough purposefulness with enough power to make him the most interesting of Broadway's new serious playwrights-few of whom, unfortunately, are interesting...
...paid $200,000 for the screen rights to Frederic Wakeman's cross, best-selling novel about radio, The Hucksters; Mayer had thought it would be good for Gable. Gable claimed shudderingly that the hero's flagrantly libertine outlook would ruin him forever as a great lover. The book's big sales and a denatured script brought Gable around. Metro decided to create its own star (Metro can create a star overnight as surely as Hormel creates Spam). Why not Deborah Kerr? But the producer, Arthur Hornblow Jr., was still worried. The Hucksters, he pointed out, is budgeted...
This gruesome novel of human beastliness was one of the last (and most appropriate) to be published in Vienna before the Anschluss. Last year, it appeared in translation in England (where Bulgarian-born Author Canetti now lives) and set the critics ablaze pro & con. "Mere Central-European portentousness . . . at once heavy and trivial. . . . A terrific and inconsequent to-do about trifles,"harrumphed the dignified London Times Literary Supplement. "Appalling, magnificent," exclaimed the Spectator, "screams and bellows of evil out of which [a] supremely mad, unfaceable book is orchestrated . . . of which we dare not deny the genius...
...modest, sometimes wan little book, The Long Wing is unlikely to cause much ruckus in the lending libraries, but it is as able a first novel as the season has shown thus far. Author Elizabeth Fenwick, a slim, soft-spoken girl of 26, was born in St. Louis; her marriage in 1941 to a French instructor at Cornell barely outlasted the war. She now lives alone in a basement apartment near the Cornell campus, writing a second novel of family life. Says she: "Families fascinate me, probably because I've never had any real family life myself...
Like most good things, "Stairway" rings the bell on the note of its unexpected freshness and intellectual maturity. Where most producers manage to distort the elementary love story into a complicated and painfully dime novel entanglement, writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Press-burger have restored this favorite theme to its original charm and simplicity...