Two weeks ago, I wrote some admiring remarks about a little-known post-WWII film called East Side, West Side. I said then that I was sufficiently impressed and intrigued by the film that I intended to read the novel upon which it is based, but that since ES,WS has evaporated into the mists of time, I would have to wait for Interlibrary Loan to dig up a copy for me. Well, the novel has arrived, coming haste-post-haste from Laramie, Wyoming, the flyleaf inscribed, "To Mrs Eccleston, from Anna." Gosh, I'd love to know who Mrs. E and Anna were, and what they (and Laramie) made of this extremely Manhattan-y book.
East Side, West Side (published in 1947), I can now report, is a big hunking doorstop of a novel. Not a very good one, I'm afraid. It is prosy, untidy, and crammed with too many episodes and too many undifferentiated characters. To transform its meanderings into an economical screenplay required great intelligence and imagination. All praise to the screenwriter, Brooklyn's own Isobel Lennart, who condensed characters, eliminated subplots, rationalized excesses, and to some degree toned down the book's inherent snobbery.
ES,WS can be described as an old-fashioned "woman's novel," and not in a good way. Its female characters are, almost uniformly passive victims. Plus there's far too much chat about makeup, dinner parties, and "fittings." There's an old --very old-- canard that an erotic novel for women consists of 400 pages of courtship and foreplay followed by a proposal of marriage. I'm afraid that ES,WS fits this unfortunate formula. Jessie Bourne, wronged and soon-to-be-divorced wife, is wooed by gentlemanly General Mark Dwyer but o so slowly. Sex is teased and deferred for chapter after chapter. In Isobel Lennart's alert and improved script, women are not afraid to take charge.
There's one episode in the novel that seriously rankled me. There's a murder. The privileged East Side aristocrats do not turn the guilty party over to the police; instead, they suppress evidence and suborn perjury in order to keep the scandal out of the newspapers. They succeed, though their plot couldn't have deceived the dullest precinct flatfoot. In the film, I'm glad to say, a killer is brought to justice.
Toward the end of the novel, Marcia Davenport introduces a long embarrassing digression in which the General, just returned from the European theater, lectures on the post war situation in Eastern Europe. I'm sorry to say that he praises Soviet aggression in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. I suspect that these tortured apologetics were written before Davenport lived in Prague and was engaged to marry the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, who in 1948 was thrown out of a window by agents of the KGB. I hope that Davenport would have changed her position after the defenestration.
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