Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...latest movie by Director Roger (And God Created Woman) Vadim, the man who virtually invented Brigitte Bardot. Forgetting France's reputation for tolerance, half the Cabinet had insisted on seeing, and in effect censoring, Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Affairs), based on an 18th century classic novel about what might be called advanced sex education. The frank and cynical description of the affairs of two wideranging lovers-aided by a camera so candid that it sometimes even peeped under the bed sheets-was carefully edited before it won a permit "for adults only." For French adults, that is. Vadim...
...easy to be generous," he tells the audience, "when you are sending money to yourself"). Later, he smoothly implicates her lover as a blackmailing gigolo. But the methodical husband has touched off a larger explosion than he designed, and the film resolves itself in a series of novel twists, most of which are so awkwardly handled that they seem to come off only in Director Edouard Molinaro's heavy hand...
...only poor, they are refugees from Turkish Anatolia. They are superstitious, backbiting and Christian to the point of worshiping a mermaid Madonna whom a passing fisherman has painted on a wall of the local church. Their life comes from the sea, and it is the sea that dominates the novel. The heroine worships it, the hero dies in it, and the plain villagers are bounded by it as their neighbors are bounded by olive groves. The young men may lust for Smaragthi. but they lust even more for the sea and the role of boat's captain...
...Balcony, by David Stacton. An astringent tale, several notches above the usual historical novel, of Egypt's neurotic Pharaoh Ikhnaton and his attempts to replace the old gods with a new and self-centered religion...
Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury. The novel is overlong (616 pages) and the prose something less than sparkling, but New York Timesman Drury knows his way about Washington...