Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. Numb is the only thing viewers are likely to feel after this film version of Jacqueline Susann's bestselling novel about three semi-recognizable pill-swallowing show-biz sickies in Hollywood's nightmare valley...
...careful with a Murdoch ending: Is she, perhaps, spoofing the conventional novel as well as the curative powers of love? Yes, but her occasional barbs are more like twinges of a habit not yet kicked. This is a well-written and well-meant novel of lovers gone astray but saved by love. If more is meant, Iris Murdoch, a gentle ironist, conceals it too well...
...Algiers rip up a street to lay down trolley tracks that had been there during the period of the story (1938-39), and even ordered a reprinting of cigarette packages to match those sold at the time. Visconti's film of The Stranger follows the action of the novel with hardly a comma missing-and therein lies both its strength and its weakness...
...established as a significant writer this year is Jane Bowles (wife of Author-Composer Paul Bowles). In her Collected Works, the most prominent entry is Two Serious Ladies, which was first published in 1943 and highly praised before fading from public attention. It is a deceptively simple novel of two women trying to change their way of life. One, a sheltered spinster, seeks salvation by becoming a prostitute and does manage to achieve a heightened sense of herself. The other woman sets off to find sin and excitement and discovers in stead spiritual narcosis and boredom. Most Bowles characters seem...
...fact is driven home by the sadistic breaking of "Chilly Willy," a boss con who traffics in cigarettes and Benzedrine inhalers. Prison officials frame him in a homosexual plot, and he is shunted into the psychiatric ward. Though a swift, engrossing narrative in its own right, Braly's novel stands as a caustic indictment of the American penal system. From Dostoevsky to Genet, writers have used prison as an effective metaphor of the human condition. Braly strips away the literary conceits and makes life on the inside painfully real...