Word: themes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Budd Schulberg, 33, with a subject even seamier than the gaudy and greedy Hollywood of his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? In The Harder They Fall, professional prize fighting is presented as a thoroughly crooked and brutal business. This point of view is entirely tenable, but as the theme of a full-length novel it gets tiresome. All the shocking details that Schulberg desperately dishes up cannot disguise the sophomoric quality of his storytelling, and readers will end up feeling that his book is almost as coarse and phony a performance as the show it satirizes...
Naturally enough for a novel of these times, the theme is the problem of freedom. Mathieu, a poor professor, has spent his whole life shaking off human responsibilities in a desire to be free, but he has only succeeded in making his life meaningless. Through the three-day span of the story, he sees many people, all of whom try to establish contact with him, and draw him into their society, to give his life a purpose. But though Mathieu would like to take the plunge, he is not convinced of the rightness of being a bourgeois or a communist...
...seen thoroughly, in perfect focus, but there are definite limitations. Only half a dozen characters are seen, representing very little of society, though a good range of neuroticism. But the chief merit of the book lies in the fact that Sartre has put his story ahead of his theme, and whatever abstract ideas of Existentialism he has expressed, he has converted them into the concrete form of dramatic situation. Perhaps a lot can be learned about the new French philosophy from the novel, but what is more important, the book will stand on its own artistic legs...
...sergeant and a suspect, hiding out from the law in an all-night movie house talk so loudly that they destroy the suspense. But most of Crossfire is a first-rate thriller, notably well written (by John Paxton) and directed (by Edward Dmytryk). Its chief weakness concerns its main theme...
This is perhaps the best novel yet written by an American about postwar Germany. It is sometimes too stagey, often too self-consciously penetrating in its analysis of character. But it is honest, observant, and has a theme at once simple and troubling. Its hero, Lieut. Cooper, works in the Newspaper Section of Military Government; his job is to unearth heroes, i.e., German journalists who had bucked the Nazis and somehow survived. He squirms guiltily in his role of judging conqueror. How would he, as a German, have stood the test of the Nazi terror? What right...