Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Human Comedy (M.G.M.) is a faithful translation of William Saroyan's novel (TIME, March 1); hence it is like no other picture that ever came out of Hollywood. Such things as plot worry Saroyan not at all. People are the grist for his mill, and the Macauleys of Ithaca, Calif, are good grist. Saroyanesquely naive one moment, they are profound the next; now smug and annoying, now simple and lovable. Definitely, they are human beings, and fortunately the story of their day-today, small-town lives is told with few of the irrelevancies that Saroyan usually contrives. There...
...pursuit of Tom Spangler by a rich young pretty (Marsha Hunt); Bess and her girl friend picking up three lonely soldiers; Marcus playing hymns on his concertina in a troop train. The sum total of these screen adventures never quite attains the soaring enthusiasm of Saroyan's novel, and some of the preaching is hard to take. Yet at its best The Human Comedy is immensely moving. Even its preaching sometimes achieves an eloquence that gives the picture a psychological fifth dimension...
Saroyan wrote The Human Comedy as a scenario (the novel was an afterthought), sold it to M.G.M. for $60,000 on the understanding that he would direct the picture. Assigned to practice on a short, the temperamental Mr. Saroyan soon got so fed up with the studio's "continuous and disgraceful crying, trembling and shaking" that he walked...
...This novel is purely a matter of personal taste. Its title and opening produce great expectation, but the story develops rather slowly, and finally one ends in a cold, foreboding shadow. Good adolescent reading, though...
...Captain Stephen Hulbert Avenel Haggard, 31, writer-actor son of Sir Godfrey Digby Napier Haggard, British Consul General in New York; grandnephew of Author H. Rider Haggard; in an undisclosed battle area. He appeared with Ethel Barrymore in 1938's Whiteoaks, same year attracted attention with his first novel...