Word: zola
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There is no Zola to describe The Debacle of 1940. But the eyewitness reports have already begun. Four important books now report how Norway was seized, why Holland fell, why France folded. One is by a Norwegian (Carl J. Hambro). Two are by Frenchmen (Andr Maurois, André Simone). One is by a U. S. woman (Clare Boothe...
...writing plays. Her Le Marquis de Villemer was a smash hit. Her anticlerical novel, Mademoiselle La Quintinie, was a bestseller. Napoleon III read all her books, went to the first nights of all her plays his censor did not ban. In 1863 she dined regularly with the Goncourts, Maupassant, Zola, Taine, Renan, Gautier, Flaubert. Most of them admired her as people admire a prehistoric skeleton. But with Flaubert she struck up a warm friendship. His genius was not yet recognized: she urged him to work, though she confessed in private that "all novels are ultimately written for chambermaids...
...thoughtful book, set two writers to adapting it, dropped the result in his wastebasket. Then he hired John Howard Lawson to write a new script on the adventures of a U. S. newspaperman in Spain and Germany, engaged Warner's star director, William Dieterle (Pasteur, Zola). Before the picture got into production, the Spanish War was over. Wanger paid Dieterle $50,000, started over again with two MARCH OF TIME radio scripters to tell the story in MOT fashion, then switched back to Sheean. After Hitler invaded Poland, Wanger dumped everything into the capacious lap of Director Alfred Hitchcock...
...John winds up in the dock facing a Sherman Anti-Trust suit. It looks bad for Big John until Square John repents, takes the witness stand to score on Uncle Sam in the most shameless courtroom bid for an Oscar since Paul Muni's blow for liberty in Zola. At this point Gable redeems himself with the first sensible line in the show. Says he: "I didn't know he had so much...
...insane urge to kill those whom he loves; Simon Simon, his sweetheart and victim, is a mouse-like beauty whose coquetry instils the audience, too, with murderous desires. Jean Renoir's direction provides scenes of electrifying frankness and does more than full justice to the grim realism of Emile Zola, on whose novel of the same title "The Human Beast" is based. Two murders which are all but shown on the screen, one suicide, maddening jealousy and maddening love, puffing locomotives and sooty slums: this should give you your fill of "reality" for more than one night. But however gruesome...