Word: quillers
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...Though his plays became sparer and less frequent, he remained an industrious producer of scripts, especially for the movies. Assigned all manner of British novels to adapt, he turned virtually all of them - The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Handmaid's Tale - into parables of class inequity and betrayed alliances. (He also did a starchy version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and, for his last script, an ugly botch of the Anthony Shaffer thriller Sleuth.) He directed other men's plays, notably Simon Gray...
...just one self-revelatory soliloquy in which Hal claims that his carousing is essentially an act and that he knows full well what will be expected of him as a mature ruler. The notion that he is a pretender as well as the Pretender has upset many critics (Quiller-Couch went so far as to brand the speech Shakespeare's "most damnable piece of workmanship"). But it can make sense of one perceives that there are two Hals. Good OF Hal, and the Prince (it is instructive to compare the off stage and on-stage Mozart...
...other Shakespearean play has elicited such a range of interpretation and evaluation. If Agate declared it one of his "unfavorite" plays in the canon, Dover Wilson thought it Shakespeare's greatest work, Wilson Knight and Henry James placed it at the top of English literature, and Quiller-Couch proclaimed it the supreme work in all literature. For me, it has unsurpassed moments, but as a whole ranks below The Winter's Tale among the four late romances. Everyone agrees that the play means more than it says, but what that meaning is remains a bone of vigorous contention...
With four speedy, intricate spy novels behind him, Adam (The Quiller Memorandum) Hall is a small luminary in the genre. In this latest case, Superagent Quiller applies his spectacular professional skills toward the saving of Britain's face in the Middle East. The plot is Hall's most extravagant yet; Quiller takes on two enemy spy groups, the North African desert and a tactical nuclear device. He inhales nerve gas, makes two parachute jumps, and gets pecked by vultures...
...Only Quiller Memorandum demonstrates a degree of technical imagination. The color--particularly a single purple-tinted shot of Berlin at night--and the editing manage to convey the ugliness of the spy business without being ugly themselves. Yet the generally decent quality of one spy movie cannot, amidst all the tripe, justify a whole mess of them...