Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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January Thaw (adapted by William Roos from Bellamy Partridge's novel; produced by Michael Todd) celebrates a small, farcical civil war inside a Connecticut farmhouse. It is, indeed, a House Divided-between a city family that had bought and remodeled it, and a country family that, by the terms of the sale, could always move back in, and did. The two clans squabble over everything from politics to plumbing, from who-owns-what to who-sleeps-where. The city slickers always get the worst of it: their living room is commandeered for funerals and littered with pigs; they freeze...
When the screen rights of the Charles Jackson novel were bought by Paramount, many people seriously doubted that this novel of a dipsomaniac, the theme of whose life has been one long dissonance of wasted talent and alcohol, with overtones of homosexuality, could ever be made into a picture...
That it has been made into a picture, and into one of the best with in recent memory, is largely the work of three men; Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, who adapted the novel of the screen, and Ray Milland, who plays the part of the hero, Don Birnam. Wilder, whose handling of "Double Indemnity" began the current wave of violent, tough guy films, also directed "Weekend...
...family, the Whitfields. Their native habitat (at Winton, N.C.) is a vast Gothic architectural horror built by the founder of the family fortune. Their pathological capers later take them to Manhattan, Florida and Europe. Some readers may think that they can trace an allusion, in the heir in this novel, to Zachary Smith Reynolds (of the Tobacco Reynoldses), whose wife, Libby Holman, was exonerated after his death by shooting...
...suicide or two, a raid on a dingy brothel (in which Anne-Charlotte is caught), and an unflagging succession of orgiastic parties at which the tobacco scions and their bibulous set try to drown their boredom. Out of these Freudian fandangos, Author Wilder has written a highly readable novel whose episodes are frequently breathless, whose dialogue is crisp, crackling and gamy. The total effect is like watching laboratory rats whirl around more & more madly in a botr tie exhausted of everything but oxygen. The prose paces the pathology...