Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is some confusion on how fuel should be apportioned under any future rationing program. John Love, White House energy chief, is most concerned, at present, with supplying homes that use heating oil. Herbert Stern, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, contends that fuel cutbacks should be made in home heating, private-car trips and commercial use so that more petroleum products can be funneled into industry...
Screenplay by STEWART STERN...
When Stewart Stern wrote Rachel, Rachel for Miss Woodward, he displayed a gift for biting dialogue and for transforming ordinary situations into sequences that carry a sharp sting of recognition. The same ability is repeated here, notably at a family funeral where the mourners try to hide their dislike of one another. Gilbert Gates directed I Never Sang for My Father, an underrated film that was also about family tensions. He shows himself once again to be an unpretentious director with a talent for worming himself to the emotional core of characters and scenes...
Finally, though, self-consciousness-the bane of academe as well as the bane of the contemporary novel-inhibits Stern from writing his love story and Merriwether from living it. They just aren't up to their fantasies. At novel's end, the reader can imagine Merriwether marrying Cynthia, buying another gabled Cambridge house, maybe even starting a second family-working, that is, toward a decent, intelligent synthesis of tradition and rebirth...
...thing the reader cannot imagine is Merriwether's ecstasy or pain really breaking through his creamy Harvard style. As if reversing Merriwether's dictum, Other Men's Daughters finally says what Stern may least want it to say: "Life gets you-through habits." ·Melvin Maddocks