Word: wildering
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That it has been made into a picture, and into one of the best with in recent memory, is largely the work of three men; Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, who adapted the novel of the screen, and Ray Milland, who plays the part of the hero, Don Birnam. Wilder, whose handling of "Double Indemnity" began the current wave of violent, tough guy films, also directed "Weekend...
There are weaknesses: the film is episodic and some of the sense of mounting horror at this rake's progress is lost because of this. The ending, Wilder and Brackett's genuflection to Hollywood's age-old formulate of the Happy Ending, is contrived and unbelievable. But Milland'e portrayal of the harrowing frightfulness of hangover, the prissy and cynical male nurse in the alcoholic ward, and numerous minor touches will all hit you where you live...
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...