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MOVIES
"SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS" and a toni hing literary career. An itinerant sign age or cowardice, good or evil, each brushed in solid
with a ingle flat paint. The women are paragons of
painter turned preacher, he had written his first
novel a a parable to be deli ,·ered in weekly install- youth, health, beauty, charm and purity. The action
ment from his pulpit. When published between goes galloping along, heedles of reality, from thrill-
FILMED AFTER 34 YEARS covers, That Printer of Udell's, to everyone' sur- ing gun duel to breathless escape, from knock-down
prise, sold 500,000 copies. The Shepherd of the Hills, fist fight, to hair-trigger rescue. But a generation of
four years later, rolled up a sensational sale of 2,000,- readers a yet unfamiliar with the austerities of a
he benign old man working at the card table below 000. Like other best ellers of that happy decade Hemingway, a Dos Passos or a Faulkner found such
T is ·writing his 18th novel. He is 70 year old. To (Gene tratton Porter's Frecl.:les: 2,000,000 copie ; moral tales as The Winning of Barbara Worth, The
a generation coming of age in a fearfully complex John Fox Jr.'s Trail of the Lonesome Pine: 1,255,- Calling of Dan Matthews and The Re-creation of Brian
world his name brings, at be t, a faint and amu ed 000), Harold Bell Wright's books were hearty, naive l{ent so engrossing that, all in all, 10,000,000 copies
smile of doubtful recognition. But to their parents melodramas of the big out-of-doors whose chief vir- of Wright's books were sold.
he will be remembered as a landmark in an era now tue was that they brought to a heterogeneou people Of his 17 novels, eight have been made into movie ,
coated with the shimmer of no talgia, a beautiful the beauty of the remote corners of their land. some of them twice. The last, 0011 to be released by
bygone day when peace and prosperity eemed like Otherwise, to modern concepts, these works seem Paramount, is a Technicolor version of The Shepherd
permanent and indestructible blessings. This old almost bare of merits. The writing is lurid and over- of the Hills (on opposite page), which, for all its moun-
man is Harold Bell Wright. wrought. The characters are talking cardboard fig- tain scenic splendor, ha even in a restrained adapta-
It wa in 1903 that he fir t tarted on hi trange ure , crudely symbolizing weakne s or strength, cour- tion, the dated sentimentality of its 34-year-o)d book.
Portrait of novelist at work is po ·ed by Harold Bell Wright untitled, is laid in the redwood country of California and monia, Mr. Wright left his ranch at Escondito, Calif. sev-
before hi bungalow in Palm Spring . The new novel, a yet will be hi fir t ince To My Sons (1984). Ill from pneu- eral month ago to recuperate in Palm Springs' de ert air.
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