Word: thrillers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Rope (Transatlantic Pictures; Warner) is an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. The story: two young men, fresh out of college, strangle a young friend-just for the thrill -and hide the body in a chest.To sharpen their excitement and selfesteem, they serve a buffet supper, off the murder chest, to the victim's father (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), sweetheart (Joan Chandler), unsuccessful rival (Douglas Dick) and a beloved former teacher (James Stewart...
...summer of 1943, after Mussolini had become the prisoner of Italy's Badoglio Government, it was Skorzeny whom Hitler personally assigned to rescue the Duce. After weeks of dime-thriller spy work he located Mussolini in an inaccessible hotel on the 9,560-ft. peak of the Gran Sasso in the Abruzzo Mountains northeast of Rome. He led an assault which reached the hotel by crash-landing gliders against the mountainside. Skorzeny reported: "Duce, the Führer has sent me as a token of his loyal friendship." They flew out together in a tiny plane which...
...Novelist Evelyn Waugh has pointed out, the bare bones of this story might just as well have come from the pen of France's murky thriller-writer, Georges Simenon, or from mysticky W. Somerset Maugham, or even from a Hollywood scripter ("One can imagine . . . Miss Bacall's pretty head lolling on the stretcher . . .") But needless to say, it is the flesh and mind, not the skeleton, that make The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene's most ambitious book...
Graham Greene has indulged this nostalgia and stayed at this level in four thrillers, all of which have been made into profitable and pulse-racing movies. But, unlike other thrillers of the gut & gat school, his "entertainments," as he calls them (in contrast to his serious novels), are not just brisk episodes of irrelevant evil. They are haunted by a problem-the plight of the human soul benighted in the back alleys of evil. For in the thriller, Graham Greene has found a literary form capable of embodying not only the violence that characterizes modern life, but the insidious violence...
...bobs up again in the backstreets of other countries, where he scours the sleazier dives and nightclubs for not-so-fresh material ("Paris is not the same since they closed The Sphinx,"* he says). Recently returned from a tour of Vienna lowlife, he is at work on a new thriller and a movie script (The Third Man) for Producers David O. Selznick and Sir Alexander Korda. His slumming adventures are received by his family with mixed feelings. His white-haired old mother very naturally writes them off as nonexistent, says firmly of the use to which her son puts...