Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Brothers Karamazov (MGM) is Hollywood's retelling of the Dostoevsky classic. Like all great works of art, the novel has an elusive way of being all things to all men. Psychologists have hailed it the profoundest of all psychological novels; diplomats still read it as a key to Russian life and temperament. To historians, it is a bomb of a book that shattered the complacent pane through which 19th century Europe surveyed the weather of the soul. To the religious, it is a prophecy of the apocalypse that has been visited upon the 20th century, and a sovereign medicine...
...barrier between the production and real dramatic meaning was built by too much effort rather than too little. By trying too hard to be epic, the director misses small and thoughtful values Novel staging and the like is to be commended but it can't stand by itself. The presentation seems to lack a unifying mind behind it. Thus the actors seem all too often as if they were emoting for their own benefit, rather than reaching for a sense of action and reaction which would make the play come to life...
...next two years Dumas 1) became Garibaldi's director of antiquities, 2) helped excavate Pompeii, 3) founded a Neapolitan newspaper, 4) started one novel, one biography (of Garibaldi), a history of the Neapolitan Bourbons in eleven volumes, countless articles, and a sociological study entitled "The Origin of Brigandage." The admiral gave birth to a baby girl and was put on "half-pay." Said happy papa Dumas: "I don't want to exaggerate, but I really believe that, up and down the world, I have got more than five hundred children...
Young Dumas' famed novel, The Lady of the Camellias (made into a play by Dumas himself and into a grand opera-La Traviata-by Verdi) was based on his love for Courtesan Marie Duplessis. She supplied him with "intoxicating orgies of the flesh"-and he, in return, struggled to reform her, adored her most when she "played the part of the repentant Magdalene." Marie died of consumption at 23, and young Dumas never forgot her glamorous, terrible life. He became "The Man in Flight from Temptation," began to write plays in which seducers were condemned with such cold precision...
...physician who claims to have been, at 16, a poet. It takes an artist to make the story of adolescent crisis fascinating to others. Such an artist is Mario Soldati (The Capri Letters, TIME, Feb. 27, 1956), a busy, boisterous Italian movie director who occasionally cools off with a novel...