Word: novels
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Alone (Warner Bros.) is a somewhat overlengthy, overwordy picturizing of James Hilton's cheery little novel of that name in which the only two pleasant characters get hanged. As an absent-minded young doctor in a small English village, Paul Muni (with a phony English accent) has a chance to act in mufti for a change, instead of doing one of those great impersonations (Pasteur, Zola, Juarez) in which he is aided by overmetic-ulous makeup and fussy mimicry. The doctor spends most of his spare time trying to keep his strict, pious, headachy wife (Flora Robson) from nagging...
Structure. As Sandburg's narrative of war and politics goes on, it gathers such momentum that he can toss in a chapter the length of an ordinary novel, dealing entirely with White House routine, and lose little by it. The look and sound and layout of Washington, the character of battles, the diversity of talk and action over the country emerge as clearly as the central presence of Lincoln, revealed in touches both familiar and unfamiliar (e.g., Emerson's noting that he "showed all his white teeth" when he laughed). On the bitter subject of conscription, North...
Thus considered, the novel is far from fascinating. What gives it its considerable interest is Author Holden's dogged, intelligent exploration of precisely those matters which run-of-the-mine novelists shirk: namely, the ambiguous complexities of even the most "normal" motives and actions. These subtleties and minutiae are themselves the true substance of this story. Lacking entirely the brilliance of the best work in its field, lacking no less the textbook glibness of the cheap work, as a psychological novel, Believe the Heart is definitely to be respected...
William Gerhardi, a polyglot Englishman who was born in Russia, has written novels, short stories, a play, a critical biography of Chekhov. He is perhaps most widely known for his novel The Polyglots. Last week he added to his list a long (484-page), glittering, malicious, at times staggeringly funny history of the Romanov dynasty. Subtitled Evocation of the Past as a Mirror for the Present, it is a profuse record of peculiarly dizzy people in a peculiarly dizzy part of the world...
Edmund Gilligan's Boundary Against Night (1938) was an ambitious, untidy, talented novel about the Boston Police Strike, included two Bannon brothers among its characters. White Sails Crowding is told by an earlier Bannon. No less high-blooded but tidier, it is a deliberately old-fashioned story of romantic adventure along the Grand Banks...