Word: saga
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Novelist Wister established the basic form of the modern sagebrush saga: the strong, silent, shy and virtuous hero; the hard-drinking, materialistic villain; the pretty, intelligent schoolteacher-heroine; the cattle politics; the slow drawl, the fast draw; the long, wary walk down Main Street to a blazing finish. And Zane Grey, a cactus-happy New York dentist who wrote 54 western novels that sold more than 25 million copies, started the mass exploitation of the Wister formula that soon turned the western story into a beltline business. Only since World War II have the cliches been rescued by a serious...
Between these points, her life has its tough spots--as has the film--but it is a relentless series of misfortunes. Director Rene Clement and his star, Maria Schell, have played this exhausting saga for every sob, every simper and every sordid detail. They have come with up an absorbing, at times sickening, film, but one which never reaches its goal of tragedy and which is more depressing than it is genuinely moving...
...agelong struggle against the sea there has been more than one death-filled night to remember, and Walter Lord's bestselling Titanic saga (TIME, Feb. 13, 1956) was bound to become the leader of a literary ghost-ship column. Authors Caulfield and Moscow are newsmen, and neither is as slick a writer as former Adman Lord. But they have raised their ships from the depths of forgetfulness and cast light into dark spaces...
...opposite tack, prefaces his little Bismarck book with the warning: "This is as it may have happened. The speeches are composed by the writer." In The Ship (1943) Briton Forester showed that he could get inside the skins and skulls of British naval officers and ratings. But in his saga of the great BB (battleship) Bismarck, half the protagonists are German, and Forester's attempts at characterization lapse into caricature. The lines he has written for them are implausibly naive...
...written about his three years in Borstal tie and short, school-uniform pants ("like a bleedin' boy scout"). The second published work (1958) by an author known in the U.S. chiefly for his play, The Quare Fellow (TIME, Dec. 8), Borstal Boy is a rousing reform-school saga...