Word: scoundrelism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SCOUNDREL TIME by LILLIAN HELLMAN...
Laconic Anticlimax. Her moment of truth with HUAC forms the heart of this slim memoir, Hellman's first-and long-anticipated-public word on her brush with McCarthyism. Two earlier autobiographical volumes, An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973), ignored this subject. Yet when the crucial scene in Scoundrel Time comes, it is a laconic anticlimax. The committee seems flummoxed by Hellman's strategy. When the chairman asks that her letter be read into the public record, Hellman's lawyers leap to distribute copies to the assembled reporters. Minutes later a voice is heard in the press...
...that her troubles were over. Screenwriting jobs dried up overnight. She was forced to sell her beloved farm in Pleasantville, N.Y., and, at a particularly low ebb, clerk in a Manhattan department store. Scoundrel Time does not dwell on these privations or, for that matter, anything else. It can be read in roughly the same amount of time Hell man spent with HUAC. Yet its understated fury is unforgettable...
Kubrick does not know what drew him to this tale of a scoundrel's rise and fall. Beyond noting that he has always enjoyed Thackeray, he does not try to explain his choice: "It's like trying to say why you fell in love with your wife-it's meaningless...
...soldier as a morally lobotomized professional is a familiar 20th century item. Indeed, pride in professionalism has too often become the true refuge of the scoundrel. Yet Buchheim skillfully dodges these issues by casting his book as documentary, fly-on-the-wall fiction. Its amount of factual authenticity about the 220-ft. submarine and its innards is mesmerizing. Technical data about pressure hulls, diesel engines, electric motors, torpedoes and underwater navigation form a web of fascinating distraction. The incessant diving, ogling of manometers and Papenberg gauges, and the flooding and blowing of ballast tanks run like a litany throughout...