Word: saroyans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Human Comedy (M.G.M.) is a faithful translation of William Saroyan's novel (TIME, March 1); hence it is like no other picture that ever came out of Hollywood. Such things as plot worry Saroyan not at all. People are the grist for his mill, and the Macauleys of Ithaca, Calif, are good grist. Saroyanesquely naive one moment, they are profound the next; now smug and annoying, now simple and lovable. Definitely, they are human beings, and fortunately the story of their day-today, small-town lives is told with few of the irrelevancies that Saroyan usually contrives. There...
...forbidden apricot tree; the pursuit of Tom Spangler by a rich young pretty (Marsha Hunt); Bess and her girl friend picking up three lonely soldiers; Marcus playing hymns on his concertina in a troop train. The sum total of these screen adventures never quite attains the soaring enthusiasm of Saroyan's novel, and some of the preaching is hard to take. Yet at its best The Human Comedy is immensely moving. Even its preaching sometimes achieves an eloquence that gives the picture a psychological fifth dimension...
...Saroyan touch leaves nothing ordinary; the film is electric with the joy of life. It gets this quality partly from the acting of Mickey Rooney, who, despite some persistent Andy Hardy mannerisms, is for once something besides a showoff. But the real star of The Human Comedy is five-year-old Jack Jenkins. When he startles a bearded scholar in the town library by suddenly poking his freckled, wistful face before the man's eyes, the film sings. Best scene is the one in which he learns the meaning of "I'm afraid." A human advertising robot...
...backs and bunions of U.S. postmen ached more than usual last week. The Book-of-the-Month Club was sending out its March selections: William Saroyan's warmhearted The Human Comedy (TIME, March 1), Berry Fleming's ladylike Colonel Effingham's Raid. Mail carriers have long been used to the load dumped on them by the U.S. Post Office's fourth largest customer,* but last week's was the greatest fardel of them all-342,000 copies of The Human Comedy alone. Crowed The Book-of-the-Month Club: "The largest advance printing...
...weather in Private William Saroyan's private world was wonderful: The Human Comedy, his first novel, was the new Book-of-the-Month Club bestseller; The Human Comedy, his first movie, had a blinding première on Broadway; Carol Marcus, striking 18-year-old actress (in two Saroyan shows), daughter of Bendix Aviation Vice President Charles Marcus, girl friend of Gloria Vanderbilt de Cicco, became Mrs. William Saroyan. They were married in Dayton, where the 34-year-old groom writes training films for the Signal Corps. The ceremony was quiet: so was the unpredictable playwright, who shattered...