Word: werfel
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Elizabeth Ross acts the part of Bernadette Soubirous, passingly well; her voice goes up and down in the right places, and she assumes the proper expressions at the proper times. But the Bernadette of the play simply is not the same pitiful; yet glorious Bernadette whom Franz Werfel portrayed in his best selling novel. The supporting roles are over-acted; the speakers try to convey in each line all the emotion and conflict of the play with the result that the audience is deluged by a flood of bombast that leaves it reeling and listless...
STAR OF THE UNBORN-Franz Werfel -Viking...
...severe heart attack warned Novelist Franz Werfel that he might not have long to live. So the author of The Song of Bernadette decided to spend the days before darkness writing a satirical novel about the world of the future. Last August, a few days before he died, Werfel was revising the last of Star of the Unborn's 645 pages. It describes how Werfel rose again from the grave, none the worse for a sleep of some 100,000 years, on the "Third Day of the Fourth Earth-Month of the Seven Hundred and Forty-Second Sun Week...
Most of Star of the Unborn is a travelogue through the future. Its chief action involves a halfhearted love affair between F. W. and an Astromental girl and the final fierce clash between the retrogrades and the Astromentalists. The nub of Author Werfel's posthumous philosophy lies in his quotation from Valentinus the Gnostic: "There are two fundamental species of angels. The ones helped man from the beginning to make the earth habitable. The others prevented him from doing it. Mankind is still far too immature to be told which of these angels are the good ones and which...
Died. Franz Werfel, 54, plump, pious Czech best-selling author of over 38 books (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Embezzled Heaven, The Song of Bernadette and the yet-unpublished Star of the Unborn), playwright (Jacobowsky and the Colonel), refugee U.S. resident since 1940; of a heart ailment; in Hollywood. Werfel, whose Forty Days was burned by the Nazis, fled Vienna and Paris two jumps ahead of Hitler's hordes, took refuge in Lourdes, France, where he heard of the vision of the little French Catholic girl, Bernadette Soubirous, and vowed to sing "her song" if he ever escaped...