Word: wildering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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WRITTEN ON THE WIND - Robert Wilder-Putnam...
Both these novels prove that this is not true. Neither of them is a great work, but both are remarkable jobs of novel-writing craftsmanship. If Robert Wilder could report U.S. life as brilliantly as he probes the iridescent slime on top of it, Written on the Wind might have been more than neurally exciting. If Frances Parkinson Keyes (rhymes with eyes) could write a novel as well as she can organize one, The River Road might have been a relevant resuscitation instead of a 747-page monument to the past. If both novelists had been stirred by the vitality...
Plantation Family. Frances Parkinson Keyes is the widow of New Hampshire's former Governor Henry Wilder Keyes, and author of some 23 books, including 1943's best-selling Crescent Carnival. In Louisiana in 1939, she was impressed by the old River Road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Most of its once gracious plantation houses were boarded up or falling apart; most of their predominantly Creole, sugar-planting owners had moved on. But among the thronging revenants in this graveyard of a once graceful provincial culture, there were a few surviving residents. Novelist Keyes decided to report their...
...also reports one or two murders, a suicide or two, a raid on a dingy brothel (in which Anne-Charlotte is caught), and an unflagging succession of orgiastic parties at which the tobacco scions and their bibulous set try to drown their boredom. Out of these Freudian fandangos, Author Wilder has written a highly readable novel whose episodes are frequently breathless, whose dialogue is crisp, crackling and gamy. The total effect is like watching laboratory rats whirl around more & more madly in a botr tie exhausted of everything but oxygen. The prose paces the pathology...
Director Billy Wilder's technique of photographing Third Avenue in the grey morning sunlight with a concealed camera to keep the crowds from being self-conscious gives this sequence the shock of reality. Other attempts at authenticity of detail are equally rewarding. The apartment Don lives in-not too flossy and not too shabby-looks exactly as the interior of a remodeled Manhattan brownstone should look. Don's girl friend (Jane Wy-man), who also plays the role of a TIME researcher, seems qualified for the job: she is bright, courteous, indefatigable and impervious to rebuffs...