Word: werfel
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...more than one respect, Franz Werfel's "Song of Bernadette" resembles Richard Llewelyn's recent best-seller and Academy award winner, "How Green Was My Valley." The same rural life, though this time in France, the same genuine sentiments of the peasantry, and the moral lesson can be found in each. However, a sullen resignation to the "Gilded Age' in Llewelyn's picture contrasts with a positive affirmation of a better life beyond this in the "Song of Bernadette...
Jacobowsky and the Colonel (adapted by S. N. Behrman from a play by Franz Werfel; produced by the Theater Guild in association with Jack H. Skirball) uses one of the grimmest moments of the war-the fall of France-for half-satiric, half-fantastic comedy. Its comic thesis is that flight from the Nazis makes strange carfellows. A swaggering, snooty Polish colonel with "a perfect 15th-Century mind" (well played by Louis Calhern) and a rueful, humorous, clever Jewish refugee (delightfully played by Oscar Karlweis) both have to bolt from Paris on the run. The colonel cannot find...
...producers gasp, "a motion picture so powerful . . . so majestic . . . so deep in its understanding . . . that for one immortal moment you touch the eternal truth . . . the final fulfillment... of everything you are . . . or ever hope to be." Nevertheless, it is a remarkably good moving picture-an improvement on Franz Werfel's reverent novel about the French peasant girl who saw the Blessed Virgin and, with her help, discovered a miraculously healing spring at Lourdes...
People have turned to inspirational reading more quickly, and in far greater numbers, than they did in World War I. The current national best-seller list includes two novels with religious themes. Jewish refugee Franz Werfel's Song of Bernadette (a story of Our Lady of Lourdes) has sold over 500,000 copies. Protestant Minister Lloyd C. Douglas' The Robe (a story of Christ's passion) has sold 240,000 copies...
Last week plump, 52-year-old Franz Werfel, now living in California, did much to satisfy the curiosity of his Catholic admirers. In a letter to Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel of New Orleans, he wrote: "I am ... a Jew by origin and have never been baptized. On the other hand, I wish to profess here before you and the world that ... I have been decisively influenced and molded by the spiritual forces of Christianity and the Catholic Church. I see 'in the holy Catholic Church the purest power and emanation sent by God to this earth to fight...