Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Room at the Top (Romulus; Continental), a film version of the bestselling novel by Britain's John Braine (TIME, May 27, 1957), is a powerful, disturbing piece of cinema realism. On the face of it. the film is a social satire: a hilarious lampoon of British provincial society, an ironic study of Angry Young Manners and morals, a Swiftian extravaganza on the problems of a social climber in a society without stairs. But behind the comic mask there is the tragedy of social change, which is here expounded as the agony of moral growth, as the spiritual disaster...
...visits to selected classes, and discussions led by members of the faculty. Planned to show visitors "that the only proved asset of a university is its faculty," according to President Jordan, the sessions included subjects ranging from a movie on the African bushmen to "The Hero in the Modern Novel...
What the boys at 20th Century Fox have done is the old familiar gag of buying the screen rights to a famous novel paying the author enough so he'll keep his hands off and then making a movie, ignoring the book as far as possible...
...Jason, Yul Brynner still looks like the inscrutable East, despite a head of jet black hair. He is neither malevolent nor disturbed, merely silent, and with him more than anyone else, one feels the huge disparity between the character in the novel and in the movie. Margaret Leighton's Caddy leans a little too markedly toward Blanche du Bois, but she is nevertheless extremely poignant, presenting a more complete, if simpler personality...
...movie reaches toward distinction in the performances of Ethel Waters as Dilsey and Jack Burden as the idiot. The stoic, yet feeling portrayal of the colored matriarch is entirely right in terms of the novel. Burden's Benjy is different from the novel's, of necessity. But he brings dignity to the role, and a face which, in one unchanging expression, somehow conveys confusion and understanding, love and anger, and an enormous sensitivity...