The Country Girl

A director tries to revile the career of a drunken actor. He believes all of his problems lie with his wife, only he falls in love with the woman herself. She's pretty much the glue that holds the actor together. At the end she has to make a decision between what man to stay with. I need to watch the movie. I can see both Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly really digging into the roles. This is my first introduction to playwright Clifford Odets. It was good but I have a feeling that he's written better.

The Good Apprentice

This was one of Murdoch's later novels. I liked Under the Net and especially The Bell more. However, this was good. It deals with a young man who gives his friend a drug as a joke which results in the boy's death. He goes in search for the father he never knew. His father is a somewhat famous artist and Edward becomes friends with his sisters who are a bohemian bunch. Edward's stepbrother Stuart is looking for a deeper meaning in life. In a subplot a woman Midge falls for Stuart. This is despite the fact she is already involved with another man and her husband. It was over five hundred pages so it took me a while to read. The Kate Winslet movie Iris was a real disappointment. Someone needs to give the writer more justice. I would like a documentary.

Prizes

Janet Frame was a writer with an interesting life. She spent some of her life in mental institutions. Her writing saved her life because it got her out of a lobotomy. This is a collection of her short stories. The beginning short stories are good but the stories I like the best are the ones that make up The Reservoir . I have aspirations for writing so to me "The Triumph of Poetry" was a horror story. I don't know if I liked it. I liked "The Teacup", the story of a girl fondling over a man that her roommate is really dating. Some of the stories deal with madness such as in "How can I get in touch with Persia?" when a man can't accept his mother's death. The later stories are more depressing as we find Janet Frame thinking about death which only makes sense since she was getting older. There's a sense of humor here especially "A Relative of the Famous". I thought Wilfred was funny. I recommend this although I heard that Janet Frame's short stories weren't what she was best at.

An Inspector Calls

This was an entertaining 40's supernatural play. It deals with an inspector who reveals to a family just how awful they were to a woman until she reached the point of suicide. The father cut off her employment, the mother refused her aide in her charity, the brother knocked her up. Or was it really an inspector from the police department? It went by pretty fast. I was disappointed to see that youtube didn't have the original old movie. That would have been fun to watch. It looks like there has been multiple versions done of this play on film though.