Word: caines
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THREE OF A KIND-James M. Cain-Knopf...
...popularly supposed that people go right on reading the thrillers of James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Serenade) through five-alarm fires and the sudden inheritance of large blocks of stock. This is very nearly true. Cain's appeal is partly sheer narrative skill-and partly the fact that he is one of the world's most vivid tellers of dingy stories...
...suspense and detonating in surprise endings-on a guaranteed, all-weather theme: what happens (lust at first sight) when a middle-aging U.S. male with a lively libido and no intellect meets a female with curves and no inhibitions. All three stories have the rancid air of authenticity which Cain obtains by screwing down his competent microscope on a drop of that social seepage which discharges daily into U.S. tabloids and criminal courts. And as in any drop of ditch water, the action in Cain's tales is of infusorial violence...
...shortest road to national suicide. Isolationism was a practicability, however immoral, before the airplane came, before international trade became so critically important, before the disease of fascism. Today isolationism is no longer even a practicable possibility. The issue is very simple, that of World War III. Ages ago, Cain asked, "Am, I my brother's keeper?"; the future of our world depends upon our answer...
...general atmosphere is a good deal better. And there is warm romantic melody in such songs as Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' and People Will Say, gay lilt in The Surrey with the Fringe on Top, humor in Pore Jud and I Cain't Say No, a roof-buster of an anthem in Oklahoma! If, compared to Lorenz Hart's at their best, Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics lack polish, so after all did frontier Oklahoma...