Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most novelists know so little about real-life politicians that they could not and should not dare take a crack at a political novel. No novelist, but a knowing man on the subject of politicians, Allen Drury, U.S. Senate correspondent for the New York Times, thus stepped into a near vacuum in U.S. letters. His Advise and Consent is the August Book-of-the-Month Club choice, and Author Drury thought he could afford to be adamant when the B.O.M. asked him to cut his great prose pudding. So it comes to the reader with all its fat intact...
...Fisherman (Centurion Films; Buena Vista) will probably net the biggest box-office catch since The Ten Commandments, despite the fact that it has all the vices and almost none of the homely virtues of the Lloyd C. Douglas novel that inspired it. For oldtime Moviemaker Rowland V. Lee (The Count of Monte Cristo) knows just where the millions lie: in fictionalized history, resplendently costumed, sexed up, and heavily flavored with religion. There are sumptuous orgies in palaces that look like the new banks of Beverly Hills; John the Baptist is beheaded in 70-mm. Panavision, color and stereophonic sound...
...Scapegoat(DuMaurier-Guinness; M-G-M), based on Daphne du Maurier's bestselling 1957 novel, is a half-serious attempt to articulate on film some notions that fascinated the author: "I wanted to discover, for myself, what happened to a man who was no longer himself. Would he, assuming the identity of another, take on the sins and the burdens and the emotions of the [other] or would his own hidden secret self become released in the other's image and so take charge...
Bucolic Charm. Mama Proust called little Marcel "mon petit loup," but far from being wolflike, he was a Little Lord Fauntleroy who threw temper tantrums and suffered from asthma. Much of Proust's boyhood had bucolic charm. At Illiers (Combray in the novel), Dr. Proust's home town, the family romped along the hawthorn hedges of the Méréglise Way (later Swann's Way) or ambled along a winding river (later the Guermantes Way). On the lawns of the Champs Elysées, the 14-year-old played at prisoner's base...
...Temple of the Golden Pavilon, by Yukio Mishima. Beauty's dark power to paralyze the will is merely one among many meanings in this sensuously symbolic novel about the burning of a 14th century Buddhist temple...