Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director-Writer Robert Benton and his cast have made their own Scenes from a Marriage-a domestic drama that starts at a wrenching pitch and builds and builds to the threshold of pain. Yet the film is not imitation Bergman; it is, above all, peculiarly American. Adapting a popular novel by Avery Corman, Benton tells an unpretentious story that might well have served such vintage Hollywood tearjerkers as George Stevens' Penny Serenade and King Vidor's Stella Dallas...
...SATISFACTION of reading a Henry James novel is seeing through eyes that penetrate the surface of Victorian manner and dress, and resolve scenes of human life into clearer images of human nature. The appeal is surely intellectual rather than emotional--the beauty of a James' novel is not so much in the characters' intrigues, but in the author's view of them...
...natural, then, in a film based on Henry James' novel The Europeans to look for someone with penetrating eyes--the filmmaker or even a character--who will transform the moving picture into insightful frames. In the film the most likely character to make such critical judgments is an old Bostonian, Mr. Wentworth (Wesley Addy), a father who sets the somber, reflective tone of his family's life. But he reserves and understates his opinions, narrating the actions of his European cousins more with his expressive eyes than with his voice...
...politeness is not the only reason the film The Europeans lacks an analytic persona. The director, James Ivory, as well as both Wentworth and James himself are, as Wentworth states in the novel, aware that "Forming an opinion--say on a person's conduct--was a good deal like fumbling in a lock with a key chosen at hazard." As analyzing human nature can be slightly slow, clumsy and difficult on paper, so much harder is it to render it on film ready made for passive viewing in a theater. Without an insightful narrator or character who is willing...
...during the Battle of Britain. But no modern writer casts a colder eye on life, on death and all the angst and eccentricity in between. A Canadian, Mrs. Gallant has lived in France since World War II. There she produces her lapidary long stories and an occasional dazzling short novel, usually set in Europe. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker. Canada seems about to give her the Governor General's Literary Award. But she is not well known in the U.S., or as celebrated as one of the prose masters of the age ought...