Word: tales
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Producer Julian Blaustein has translated his tale from World War I to World War II, but too often he retains a dated atmosphere of glamour-by-gaslight. Hero Ford, a playboy from Argentina, falls pampassionately in love with Heroine Thulin, a Parisienne married to a patriotic editor. When the editor joins the Resistance, the hero realizes his duty and secretly does the same. Unaware of his decision, the heroine decides that he is merely a lightweight, and goes back to her husband. At the fade, while the violins soar among the bomb bursts, the poor misunderstood playboy dies heroically...
...players. It is to catalyze these dark musings, not to commemorate the players, that Stacton restages the old battles. Not surprisingly, his novels lack the painted scenery and speeches in all-purpose King James dialect that clutter other historical fiction. In A Signal Victory, the ironically titled tale of the Spanish conquest of the Maya civilization, there is not a line of dialogue. The book's most vivid presence is that of Author Stacton, brooding in mordant aphorisms about the uses of power. Everything is stated in epigrams, and he can drop the material for an evening...
...with Marguerite Duras' rather somnolent script. Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, wrote novels that yearned for visual expression. In La Jalousie, for instance, he spends most of his time painting in the very smallest details of a banana plantation. Amid the minutiae, the author tells an exceedingly ambiguous tale of a husband's jealousy, a tale that never quite escapes from the encroaching landscape drawn in so heavily that it overshadows all else...
...There are long majestic strings of rhetorical questions-"But why should sorrow be always creeping in upon joy? Why should it pierce him and find him out in this dear, beautiful place into which he had been wafted so mysteriously?" The plot-a 19th century version of the ancient tale of Tristan and Isolde-is every bit as lurid as the prose. Cryptic strangers turn up at Cornish inns; blackhearted villains display appropriately "bestial" passions; brave young Tristan nearly gets himself killed stopping the runaway horses of Isolde's barouche. Nature obligingly spurs on the action with torrential rains...
...prevent the Indonesian tantrum, it was in plenty of time to infuriate the Dutch. "I don't understand this," fumed Prime Minister Jan de Quay. Said Amsterdam's Algemeen Handelsblad: "Another illusion went up in smoke. Reality is facing us more and more clearly. The fairy tale of American good will toward The Netherlands' standpoint cannot be sold any more, not even to the most gullible soul...