Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...script-writer, producer, director, or the actors. If any of these fail, the movie cannot be first-rate, and that is very likely the most important reason why the percentage of excellent films is so small. "Great Expectations" is a great picture. No one factor made it so. The novel by Dickens is not one of his very best, but it is rich with the crowded, humorous, hypocritical, grotesque, vigorous, and tragic life of Nineteenth-Century England. The producers of the picture have reproduced this life, giving it the sounds and scenes that were everyday to the Victorian, and have...
...grotesque bride of another day, who dies horribly in the great, old, rat-infested house. Practically every character is sympathetic and human, yet each holds a menace of grotesque evilness in himself, something that is brought out more clearly, yet just as subtly, in the movie as in the novel...
...story is less novel. Mario (Ricardo Montalban), son of a famed Mexican ex-matador (Fortunio Bonanova), has talent in the bull ring, but his heart is in his music. When all Mexico accuses him of cowardice, his twin sister Maria (Esther Williams) doubles for him and, in a slather of veronicas, saves his reputation. He returns the compliment by saving her life. After that he proceeds to the conservatory with father's blessing. Sister is happy with her young man (John Carroll), and everything ends in a fiesta. Blonde, blooming Esther Williams is about as Mexican as Harry Truman...
Apparently Author Scott thinks so too, for she has lavished 175,000 warning words on the clinical details of Jimmy's decline & fall. The publishers urge readers not to assume that The Story of Mrs. Murphy is simply "another" novel about a drunk. They are quite right. Distinguished by nothing except low-grade prose and high-grade intentions, it is probably the worst novel of its kind since the days of T. S. (Ten Nights in a Barroom) Arthur...
...Grand Hotel. Her first novel, Give Us Our Dream, is her well-intentioned but singularly sterile effort to excavate the humanity that pulsates under the drabness of Sunnyside, a railroad-side section of New York City where she lived after her return from Japan. Her characters all live in the same boxlike apartment house, and their humdrum lives shortly become caught up in a naive pattern which is spun without imagination. In this Grand Hotel without grandness, coincidence and sentiment are bigger than life...