Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Zhivago is a novel by a poet, and as such is at once too great and too restricted for its literary form. It is apolitical, and, ironically, a political shillelagh inveighed by both sides in the Cold War. It alternates between axes of profound beauty and profound confusion. It is not quite Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, but its intellectual vitality and respect for human dignity make it tower above anything else around these days...
Tall Story, latest comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Grouse (Life with Father), pleased Philadelphia (and was bought immediately by Hollywood). Adapted from a rather more serious novel (The Homecoming Game), the story concerns an overly ethical professor of ethics (Hans Conried) faced with flunking a star basketball player before the big game. A fellow facultyman: Playwright Marc (The Green Pastures) Connelly, making one of his occasional appearances as an actor. Wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer's Henry T. Murdock: "An evening of hearty laughter with no complicating complexes." Opens on Broadway...
...last novel was The Captive and the Free. It is unmistakably incomplete, but unmistakably Cary. What he said in it, imperfectly through his pain, is that some people are larger than life and will not or cannot be bound by common constraints. These are the free; those who run with the herd are captives. And Cary also said that there is more than one road to God, though no road is easy...
Author Connell's novel is an expanded version of a short story that appeared in The Anatomy Lesson (TIME, May 27, 1957), but added incident does not necessarily bring greater understanding. When catastrophe breaks into his heroine's hothouse existence, the author flinches nearly as much as she: the event is seen from the outside, and the reader cannot know if Mrs. Bridge feels any more deeply than the cliches she utters. He is a gentler observer than Philip Wylie, but Connell's conclusions about U.S. womanhood may not be too different...
Inspector Maigret, which has been at the Exeter for several weeks, is a bit on the psychological side, but not quite intellectual enough to be disastrous, Based on a Georges Simenon novel, the film concerns the untimely demise of a long string of plump, middle-age women in a small Paris district. The murderer becomes overconfident, and in one of his triumphant moments makes the mistake of calling the famous Maigret to goad him into action. Once the pipe-smoking, perpetually weary Maigret arrives on the scene, however, the ball-game is clearly over for the murderer. Using most...