Word: straightforwardness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Come, Sweet Death. Author Wharton tries to make the maze of modern experimentation seem simple and straightforward by using the Philip Wylie technique of creating a few plain-talking "characters" and letting them unburden themselves to Whartonesque psychiatrists and sages-thus giving a coat of fictional jam to his strictly nonfictional pills. Chief of these characters is successful, middle-aged Businessman George Burton; chief of George's problems is simply that "for months he had been sinking into deeper and deeper depression . . . was alternately bored and afraid . . . Hardly a day passed that the thought did not cross his mind...
Miss Holliday is most of "Born Yesterday," but there are other important parts. Harry Brock, the junk tycoon, is played by Broderick Crawford; William Holden plays Paul Verrall, a crusading reporter. Both give good, straightforward performances, and get author Kanin's ideas across well. Crawford's Harry Brock is not quite up to what Paul Douglas achieved on the stage, however. Crawford plays the junkman as a surly oaf and a menace--both of which he is, of course. But the part is a comic one as well, and Mr. Crawford hasn't done much to earn laughs. After...
...into exile. Those sufficiently versed in trick endings may arrive at the conclusion before the author does: the talkative stranger is the matador himself, and the unfaithful wife is the "senorita" the writer has just made a date with. The best story in the book has a winning, straightforward charm; two little Scots boys, forbidden a "dawg," kidnap and care for a "babby" instead...
...Dagger Missions. Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy's Was There, while dry and cautious, belonged on the shelf of must reading for the history-minded. So did Admiral Frederick Sherman's Combat Command, General Mark Clark's spirited Calculated Risk, and General Bob Eichelberger's straightforward story of the Eighth Army in the Pacific, Our Jungle Road to Tokyo. Several of the personal-adventure books made excellent reading. Best of the lot was British Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean's Escape to Adventure, a lusty, well-written narrative of daring and luck in carrying out cloak & dagger...
...prize-a 150-lb. calf-went to a Bologna leftist named Armando Baldinelli. His oil of peasants parading with pitchforks was straightforward enough, but it was also as pedestrian as it was proletarian. Other artists carted off such prizes as an irrigation pump, a pony, fertilizer, tomato paste, sausages, and of course cheeses...