Word: stendhal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...over-sentimentalizes the American past, suggesting that only yesterday Horatio Alger was king. "Status striving" to him seems to be a modern menace, and he writes of it with scant mention of Thorstein ("conspicuous consumption") Veblen or of the massive, fascinating and often exhilarating social climbs described by Balzac, Stendhal, Jane Austen...
Room at the Top. A curiously old-fashioned plot about social climbing, recalling Stendhal's The Red and the Black, in a modern welfare-state setting. Based on a book by John Braine, one of Britain's angry young novelists, the picture sometimes verges on caricature and cliche, but it remains one of the best British movies in years...
Braine's novel, in fact, presents a startling parallel to The Red and the Black. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal's masterpiece, Hero Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) is a handsome young parvenu of considerable practical intelligence. Rising 25, he sits at his desk in the town hall and dreams the usual "clerk's dream" of sports "cars, town houses, Riviera villas, linen sheets-and women who look right in them. "I'm going to have the lot," he announces grimly one day, and, like Sorel, he sets his cap for the daughter (Heather Sears...
Newsmagazine sales rose by 40%, and vendors found they were selling out income tax guides, the Hobo News, and paperbound books from James M. Cain to Stendhal. Subscribers to the Wall Street Journal angrily reported that their copies were being stolen from in front of their office doors. No New Yorkers were more dismayed by the strike than the numbers-game players: the payoff number is currently derived from the total mutuel take at Maryland's Pimlico race course, a figure that conveniently is carried by the daily press...
...fact remains that when Europe lived in terror and tyranny, the household of dauntless Germaine de Staël earned the honor of being regarded (in Stendhal's words) as "the Grand Assizes of European opinion...