Baldwin, James (Vol. 17) - Frederic Raphael

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

The Devil Finds Work is a sermon with a celluloid text….

To take the movies as a source for instances of wilful bad faith is hardly a case of tendentiousness….

[There] are times here when Hollywood's falsenesses—even in such well-meaning pieces as In The Heat of The Night, The Defiant Ones and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner—are assumed to be more deliberate than they are likely to have been. There is only one thing which Hollywood tries to do on purpose and that is to make money….

I am not sure that [Baldwin] will ever be satisfied. He is so full of pity and terror that it would need a tragic medium more noble, more generally honoured than anything contemporary culture can provide to purge him of them. Baldwin has been one of the few essential novelists of our time and one cannot but regret the impatience which has driven him to the kind of free-associational prose libre he delivers...

[The entire page is 301 words long]

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