Word: windedly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From here on in, things develop into a kind of actors' field day, with alternations of slapstick and high comedy, carefully understated emotion, and plain-&-simple bathos. Before he is through, Director Victor Fleming (Gone With the Wind) manages to lug in almost everything except a flood, a fire, an Indian massacre and a trained collie. But the dialogue somehow holds up under the strain, and there are a few wonderful sequences: Joan Blondell as the life of a rowdy party; Gable on a supercilious tour through a farmhouse; Gable and Garson engaged in a hen hunt. Adaptable Cinemactress...
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...
Tobacco Scions. There is nothing genteel about the skeletons in Written on the Wind, and they never stay in the closet. They include second and third generations of a multimillionaire tobacco family, the Whitfields. Their native habitat (at Winton, N.C.) is a vast Gothic architectural horror built by the founder of the family fortune. Their pathological capers later take them to Manhattan, Florida and Europe. Some readers may think that they can trace an allusion, in the heir in this novel, to Zachary Smith Reynolds (of the Tobacco Reynoldses), whose wife, Libby Holman, was exonerated after his death by shooting...
...sister, Anne-Charlotte (whom her brother sometimes characterizes as "a nasty little bitch"). There is also Reese, a sharecropper's son who is brought up with Gary and Anne-Charlotte to act as an elevating influence. He succeeds chiefly in being sardonic and truculent. Written on the Wind reports the lifelong intellectual homosexuality between Reese and Gary. It 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...