Word: novel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Novelist-Playwright Anita Loos was making the most of a good thing. Having cleaned up over $1,500,000 on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a magazine sketch (1924), a first novel (1925), a play (1926) and a movie (1928), she had collaborated with Playwright Joseph Fields to turn it into a musicomedy. As rehearsals began in Manhattan, a photographer recorded an unrehearsed resemblance between Author Loos and the 1949 version of her heroine, up & coming Comedienne Carol (Lend an Ear) Channing...
...fierce sufferings of humanity the musical, like the novel, brings a real humaneness and makes a frontal emotional assault that has strong popular appeal. It is indeed the very pull of the thing that, for want of judgment, helps to pull it down. Thus, though the story has been greatly simplified, the effect is less movingly simple. For one thing, formal primitive speech often sounds stilted when spoken. But on the stage, sometimes a gesture is better than any speech; sometimes words don't need music, nor does music need all the stops pulled out. Too often in Stars...
This is pretty much what Robert Graves's new novel is all about-except that peppy Ysabel doesn't join the admiralty until the last quarter of the book, while the gold rush occurs in the first three-quarters and is led by Ysabel's husband, who is a general...
...this point, you could have gone yourself to refute the decline-of-American-movies theory. But "Peter Ibbetson" should keep you home. It is an adaptation of a DuMaurier novel, set (of course) in the 19th century. It is the worst movie I have ever seen...
Meanwhile, other British beasts were reverting to type. "A blue tit," wrote a correspondent to the letters column of the Times of London, "flew in at my window this morning, woke me up by thumping a Balzac novel, and proceeded to reconnoitre...