Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Born to Win is a problem picture about The Problem (dope). It is also about more than that-which is where other problems enter in. With them come some social commentary, some of the aspects of a conventional thriller, some comedy, some rueful drama. Trouble is, all the parts never completely fit together...
Women's Lib has produced literary heat, but no warmth-and little humanity. The very person to redress this balance turns out to be no hot-panting tractarian, but rueful Novelist Peter De Vries, who, like Adlai Stevenson and Mark Twain, has suffered from the American assumption that anyone with a sense of humor is not to be taken seriously. De Vries is the most domestic of writers. Except for his masterpiece, The Blood of the Lamb, his literary charades more or less cheerfully present a more or less repetitive series of matrimonial alarums and excursions. The De Vries...
...Greene himself. No novelist, either, has grown so rich or so critically secure by dramatizing spiritual insecurity. A Sort of Life has considerable shortcomings. Yet it makes overwhelmingly clear how Greene the child became creative father to Greene the writer-and to that tortured crew of characters whose rueful collective motto might well read: "With God for a friend, you don't need an enemy...
...magazine. Once again the plot proceeds not so much by incidents as coincidence. In a series of set pieces -a funeral, a literary cocktail party -characters bob up from the past, intermingle, realign themselves and caper off. As they pass, the inexhaustibly observant Nick murmurs his commentary with a rueful smile. All rather contrived, perhaps, but as Powell has one of his characters say: 'Human beings aren't subtle enough to play their part. That's where art comes...
...figure out what I've hit on. Some day a man will walk into my office as ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher." Underlying the satire is a rueful equanimity and a lingering hope, one sometimes found in both Catholics and Southerners, that there may be a point to the working and watching, that there may be one day a kingdom for the exile...