Word: novel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Heiress (adapted from Henry James's Washington Square by Ruth & Augustus Goetz; produced by Fred F. Finklehoffe) turns a well-nigh perfect novel into a very imperfect but highly interesting drama. That is no trifling feat, for the novel is not very dramatic. Mr. & Mrs. Goetz give the story more kick by settling for less art. At their worst, they are not so much collaborating with Henry James as colliding with him; but on the whole they do a good job. Famed Director Jed Harris (Broadway, The Front Page, Our Town) does a better...
Most such visitors caught on in a few days and trotted along home like good little boys. One who didn't is the hero-or victim-of this novel, mild, baldish Dr. John Jones, Professor of the Assyrio-Bdbylonic, Chaldean, Phoenician, Etruscan and Turkish languages at St. Jude's Theological Seminary...
...arena for this performance, an aged novel has been unearthed from the shelves of some bankrupt circulating library, its cover has been dusted, and its plot has been transmitted to celluloid. The utterly fantastic doings somehow involve the wife of a Breton fisherman (Garson), who takes up with a nasty friend of her supposedly dead husband. But of course, just as she is about to marry the friend, (after four reels of indecision), the husband shows up and the two men have the customary brawl on the customary cliff-top. You have but one guess who it is that falls...
...same jobs, tomcatting after the same girls, fighting each other, and unable to do without each other. Wild Harvest adds something new to the formula: this time the heroes are migratory workers, involved in the robust job of wheat harvesting with combines. The harvesting job gives the audience something novel and vigorous to look at, and it also gives the players something better to do than talk and make faces at each other. But there is still too much talking and face making...
Most of Charles Morgan's novels (The Fountain, Sparkenbroke, The Voyage) start out with a fair wind but eventually become becalmed on a sea of pretentious ideas. In The Judge's Story, Morgan shunts his characters around to illustrate a problem which is too big for them, and too big for his novel: ". . . The problem . . . of how, in the modern world, to remain civilized and free...