Word: priestleys
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Priestley; produced by Crosby Gaige). Author John Boynton Priestley is a blunt Yorkshireman who has written several popular books, of late years has turned to playwriting. Three of his plays are currently on the London stage. Last week one of them,*another attempt to dramatize that old riddle, time, failed to impress Manhattan audiences either as drama or as metaphysics. Time and the Conways was like a heavy slab of Yorkshire pudding with no roast beef...
...Novelist Priestley has said that "the audience will accept almost anything during the first act." What he makes them accept in Time and the Conways' first act is a boring family party. The Conways are celebrating Daughter Kay's (Jessica Tandy) 21st birthday by playing charades and talking big about the future. All of them look forward to successful careers, happy marriages. Suddenly Kay, Cassandra-like, peers into the night and foresees the drab reality...
...Herald Tribune's Isabel Paterson: ''There is no loftiness of spirit in his books, and a book must have a soul to be great." Max Eastman accused Hemingway of having "... a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on the chest. . . ." J. B. Priestley spoke of ". . . Mr. Ernest Hemingway's raucous and swaggering masculinity, which I am beginning to find rather tiresome. It is time some friend spoke sharply to Mr. Hemingway." The N. Y. Times's John Chamberlain asked: "Can it be that Hemingway has been writing pidgin English from the start...
Singing the glory of Arizona's climate, landscape and cowboys, Author Priestley less resembles a coyote than an oldtime prophet. The prophet's rhapsodies change to a jeremiad when he tackles U. S. women, Manhattan, Hollywood, the stricken man-made landscape between, the profligate waste of natural resources, the "chilly dank hell" of moral decay rising from U. S. indifference to its gangsters, its rich men and their political ineptitudes...
Chief U. S. illusion, says Priestley, is the notion that Americans are dyed-in-the-wool individualists, and for that reason hostile to the Russian collectivist scheme. The truth, he argues, pointing to the easy way of mass U. S. propaganda, to the lavish Russian imitation of U. S. ways, is exactly the other way round. "That is why," he concludes, "America is the country of awful flops and sudden gigantic successes." In short, "the average modern American" is a socialist at heart, but does not know...