Word: townes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Concerning the letter of John R. Stevenson of Yoder, Wyo.-by all means, no Kennedy for President. He is a Catholic, and all Catholics are bad. His grandfather was a saloonkeeper, and they are all bad. He comes from a town where 99.9999% of the folks have never heard of Yoder, Wyo. Man! That's real...
...Most road surfaces are of highest quality, and all are dustless," said the captain. "Thousands of cars in every American town keep rushing past, one behind another, in two or three or four rows, all maintaining good speed in rhythmic, graceful waves of disciplined traffic. Traffic policemen are never seen on roads normally. They rush in from police stations only if there is an accident or anything untoward happens. All public buses invariably run on time, and are rarely overcrowded. The minimum sounding of the horn, by all motor vehicles, is amazing...
This, alas, is more than one can say of "The Island of Dawn" by William Wertenbaker. The story is about a woman living in New York who is called to her home town in the far south for her twin sister's funeral. She is very much afraid to go, because her departure was an escape which she fears wasn't complete. Although there are occasional very convincing statements of her loneliness and fear, there is never an adequate explanation of it. Instead of being seductive, the South seems dull. What sinister undercurrent there may be is over-whelmed...
Peyton Place (Jerry Wald-20th Century-Fox) cuts some of the sex and violence from Grace Metalious' hugely profitable peeping tome (300,000 hardbound, 3,000,000 paperback copies sold) about low jinks in old New Hampshire. The novel's small-town citizens were guilty of murder, suicide and such richly varied venery as nude swimming, bundling in convertibles, bastard-getting and incestuous rape. The film script tidies up a few of these sensations, softens a calculated abortion to an involuntary miscarriage, and lets a couple of villains become last-reel good guys. But there is still...
Nevertheless, the film is superbly convincing in its panoramas and crowd shots and in some fine scenes of young, nonviolent love. For the first time in memory, a New England town is filmed with neither the whales-and-ale quaintness of a picture postcard nor the brooding gloom of an H. P. Lovecraft horror story. Camden, Me. (chosen for the film setting because Gilmanton, N.H., where Novelist Metalious wrote the book, does not look the part) is prim, bleak or beautiful, but never stagy, and the townsfolk extras look and act like people. What is even rarer, so do most...