Word: zolas
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Ever since Zola, writers have tried to commit to paper the daily living of average families. "Naturalism" had a notion that an account of how such a family struggles through its oatmeal, breeds another generation to do likewise, could present all human life fearlessly and whole. The result of this literary theory has been some good amateur anthropology, a titanic amount of dullness, little...
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...