Word: wilder
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Shadow of a Doubt (Universal) has the makings of a superb film: Alfred Hitchcock directed it; Thornton Wilder and Sally Benson helped write it; two of Hollywood's best young actors-Teresa Wright (Pride of the Yankees) and Joseph Gotten (The Magnificent Ambersons)-play in it. The result: a superb film...
Already the season's most controversial play, Thornton Wilder's cockeyed The Skin of Our Teeth (TIME, Nov. 30) last week started a louder controversy concerning its source. In the Saturday Review of Literature Sarah Lawrence College's Joseph Campbell and Reader's Digest Editor Henry Morton Robinson blasted Wilder's account of the human race as "an Americanized recreation, thinly disguised, of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake...
...recondite novel, the two men launched their attack with a great show of ammunition. First cannonading away at The Skin of Our Teeth's "borrowed" form, characters, plot elements, they followed up with scholarly small shot, including the charge that "the great swathing of scarfs and wrappings" of Wilder's Mr. Antrobus (see cut) looked like the "caoutchouc kepi and . .. blaufunx fustian and ironsides jackboots and Bhagafat gaiters and his rubberized inverness" of Joyce's H. C. Earwicker...
...harassed, Playwright Wilder was not at all helpful. "All I can say," he told reporters brusquely, "is to urge those who are interested to read Finnegans Wake and make up their minds for themselves." The few initiated stalwarts who had both read Finnegans Wake and seen the play, were of the opinion that Campbell & Robinson were trying to make headlines out of what should have been footnotes, were confusing influences with imitation. According to Michael Myerberg, the producer of The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder got his idea when a chicken landed in his lap at Hellzapoppin...
During the year: > Many writers, some despairing of interpreting war during a war, found themselves in uniform. Among them: Novelists James Gould Cozzens, Julian Green, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Knight, F. Van Wyck Mason; Playwrights Sidney Kingsley, Thornton Wilder, Laurence Stallings, William Saroyan; Poets Christopher La Farge, Karl Jay Shapiro, Harry Brown; ex-New Yorkers John Cheever, Geoffrey Hellman, Edward Newhouse; Autobiographer Vincent Sheean; Historian Samuel Eliot Morison; Newshawks Jimmy Cannon, Marion Hargrove, Hartzell Spence...