Word: successful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This is another novel whose success is as predictable as next year's Democratic majority in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Screen rights to this novel of 18th Century France sold for $350,000 last May; it is the Literary Guild choice for October, and thus sure of sales in the hundreds of thousands. To these rewards, critical acclaim is not likely to be added on the same scale. Proud Destiny resembles War and Peace in the general aim of treating great events (in this case France's part in the American Revolution) in terms of the people who enact...
Period Sets. Sixty-three-year-old Lion Feuchtwanger is a professional hand at this and a capable one. Writing in pre-Hitler Germany, he used medieval material in The Ugly Duchess, 18th Century Germany in Power (his first U.S. success), 1st Century Rome in his Josephus trilogy. He has worked on Proud Destiny in Santa Monica, where he settled after fleeing Europe in 1940, and the novel smells faintly of the Hollywood atmosphere in which it was composed. The period sets are painstaking, the main characters are photogenic. With no strain on his attention, the reader can savor from...
...General Washington or the Continental Congress. Without Beaumarchais' stubborn vanity and romantic ambition, the revolting colonies might not have armed the troops that forced the British surrender at Saratoga. Without that victory, Franklin's mission might have failed. Even with that victory, says Feuchtwanger, Franklin owed his success less to the wisdom of French policy than to a whim of Antoinette. It will probably be news to paid-up members of the D.A.R. that so much of the American Revolution was won on the playing fields of a Versailles boudoir...
...factor that makes Mac beam brightest is the success of the pre-season practice. Twenty-five athletes reported on the Business School Field for the first workout last Monday and by Saturday the number had risen to 40. "Why, before this year." Mac said, "no one ever appeared until the first day of registration...
...play has good dialogue, and may have some slight success on Broadway, with some of the actors removed and a good deal of polishing. Everett Sloane, as the mind, does a lot with a ridiculous role, and Massey is his imperturbable self...