Word: trowell
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Jargon with a Trowel. The Harder They Fall shows a certain verve in the writing; the Eighth Avenue, Manhattan atmosphere and guttersnipe jargon are accurate, though laid on with a trowel; some of the minor characters-trainers, punch-drunk fighters, hangers-on-are human, pathetic and partly credible. Schulberg has hung around the sidelines of boxing for years, but only as a spectator. It is poor luck for him that Eddie Lewis' relationship with his boss is reminiscent of Jack Burden's with his (a fictional Huey Long) in last year's Pulitzer Prize novel...
...drift around the periphery of fixed society. Pritchett furnishes the wastelands of their minds with the unspoken impulses, the suppressed, half-formed resentments, suspicions and despairs that shape their personalities and behavior. Outwardly nothing much happens to these people. The reader who wants his excitement laid on with a trowel, characters forced toward some unexpected twist-ending by an inventive author, will find them unrewarding. As in the stories of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, the excitement in these stories grows out of ordinary human tensions and becomes most intense when the explosion is an inner discovery, unspoken and unseen...
...have come to prefer to Picasso. He was monkish old Georges Rouault, whose fat, smoldering judges, jeweled kings, whores, clowns and solitary Christs grow richer and stranger year by year. They looked not like paint but hot coals, caked angrily into patterns by a muscle-bound man with a trowel...
...Borrowing the phrase from Celia in As You Like It: "Well said: that was laid on with a trowel...
With enough kindliness and finesse, something delightful might have been made out of a story like this. Desperately short on finesse, the film's makers laid on the loving kindness with such a broad commercial trowel that the effect is often suffocating. Most of the archness and comedy is even harder to take: e.g., the mystification over such bits of vital indigenous slang as "hot dog" and "bull" (policeman...