Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) needed this picture like-unless, after an eight-year absence from moviemaking, it was only money he was after. The story about a Jewish family has undergone nearly every possible treatment by Author Arnold Schulman (one-act play, TV script, a novel, two full-length plays, one of which made Broadway) except maybe a synopsis baked inside a Chinese fortune cookie...
...change again," writes Author Feibleman of the hero's sweetly frigid second wife, "by so much as the amount of cream in her morning coffee." He could have added that the hero himself does not alter by a jot, after a point early in the novel, and neither do his two tormented daughters. Observed briefly, each member of this wealthy Southern family seems whole and healthy; followed for a period of years, each one is seen to be stunned by some calamity beyond all chance of growth or shrinkage...
...hero, crippled emotionally when his second wife dies in childbirth, raises his infant daughter in her mother's cold image, and thwarts all the child's efforts to break free of his oppressive love. But swathed about this core is an unbelievable amount of mustachioed melodrama. The novel's major fault is that, for the greater part of its length, the major actors glide about like decapitated ghosts searching for their heads, scaring the daylights out of onlookers but affecting each other...
Coming after 29-year-old Author Feibleman's exceptional first novel, A Place Without Twilight (TIME, March 3, 1958), the new book is a disappointment. But for all its melodrama and its occasional flavor of Charles Addams under the magnolias, it is still well worth reading. Feibleman is a fine stylist who almost never gets his hands sticky. He sees people shrewdly, and can set down small scenes with great poignancy. The episode that ends the book is a masterpiece-even though it parodies the whole novel and the entire Southern school of literary fungus munchers. After the hero...
Like other of Ingmar Bergman's movies, Wild Strawberrries militates for crediting the man with a gift. Here, certainly, as in a fine novel, he has portrayed successfully what others can barely talk about happily...