Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Crime and Punishment (adapted from Dostoevsky's novel by Rodney Ackland; produced by Robert Whitehead & Oliver Rea) is perhaps too great a novel to be tampered with. But by the same token it would seem able to withstand a lot of tampering. Dostoevsky's great study of crime and punishment is also a tense story of crime and detection. Before its arrogant Nietzschean murderer Raskolnikov (John Gielgud) is guided toward confession and atonement by a humble Christian prostitute (Dolly Haas), he is played with, cat-&-mouse, by the Moscow police...
Last week's stage version managed to bury not only the deeper half but the whole of Dostoevsky's novel-giving it, as the only compensation, a highly picturesque funeral. Actor Gielgud's Raskolnikov can be enjoyed as a brilliantly mannered performance, but as a portrait it is worthless. Ackland's stage piece itself is like a translation that inserts innumerable adjectives while omitting all the verbs; it substitutes atmosphere for action, and theatrical color for dramatic force. The stage set-a cross-section of Raskolnikov's swarming rooming house-is a fine device...
Great Expectations (British). David Lean's fine, bounteous transcription of the Dickens novel (TIME...
Sometimes Stalin himself takes a hand and makes or breaks a play or novel. Writers are lectured on how certain types of characters are to talk (sailors, army officers, etc.), are even included in the Five-Year Plan: "We must continue the labor of creating monumental works wherein the man of our age, the man of the Stalin type, the creator of Plans, will be revealed in his full stature; works in which will be shown how the will power of that man was forged, how his soul was formed and how his consciousness was strengthened, enriched and armed...
Konstantin Simonov, Russia's most successful literary handyman (three theaters were running his plays simultaneously in Moscow last month), recently wrote a novel that seemed to have all the correct ingredients. The Soviet hero returned home after two years in the U.S. to find Russia overwhelmingly more attractive. But the pontiffs weren't satisfied. Simonov's Smoke of the Fatherland, just out, was written off as "immature and unsound." The surprising reason: the Propaganda Committee of the Communist Patty said he hadn't proved his thesis...