Word: tales
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Love Story was a pretty low starting point. But at least it lacked the self-conscious nervousness that runs through this effort. In Fairy Tale, Segal does not even reach the heights attained by Jonathan Livingston Seagull. For some reason, every time he has the opportunity, he takes the cheap shot, makes some inane remark, or collapses into an idiot's snideness...
ERICH SEGAL HAS written a sequel to Love Story, his tale of passion at Harvard and Radcliffe. Called Fairy Tale, it reasonably could be expected to deal with homosexuality at Yale, but it doesn't. Instead, it borrows the locale of Deliverance, although it leaves out the sodomy...
...Fairy Tale is 47 pages of pictures and prose about hillbillies. Segal tells the story of a hick kid who goes into the big city to buy a used car from a dealer named Happy Humphrey, gets swindled, but through an ironic twist of fate wins out in the end. Happy Humphrey trades Jake Kertuffel a handful of lima beans (from which a money tree is supposed to grow) for the Model T in which the Kertuffel clan has sent its scion into the city. Ironically, a money tree springs up, and the Kertuffels buy a Cadillac with some...
...lots of ways this is an uncomfortable book. It isn't a child's Fairy Tale--too much of the humor of the thing is of a mildly sick adult variety, the degenerate offshoot of upper-middle class Broadway comedy, with its pallid neuroses that all the ashamed afflicted can laugh at. Segal also makes a real effort at verbal acrobatics, and falls flat. "Magic beans, the stuff dreams are made of! And also magic vegetable stew," can't qualify as one of the better bits of verbal word play of the late 20th century...
Anatomy of a Murder. The first of Otto Preminger's films in which he tried to raise moral and political questions stars James Stewart as a rustic lawyer who plays jazz piano while thinking out his strategy. Fascinating psychology in a complex courtroom tale. With Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, and Joseph Welch...