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According to Columnist Graham's commercialized confessions, Fitzgerald after his famous Crack-Up was a brilliant, cynical, romantic wreck, and his life a brief, inglorious skidmark to the edge of eternity. According to this picture, he was a great, misunderstood man who was driven to drink by outrageous fortune, but just before his death he experienced a transfiguration in which the heroic drunk and the dissolving genius were transformed and redeemed in a last great love. The notion is so silly that not even the moviemakers could convince themselves it was true. Scarcely a line in Sy (The Big Country) Bartlett's script rings true, and some of them are almost ridiculously false. ("How did a girl as pretty as you get to be the biggest witch in Hollywood?" a famous actress shrieks at Sheilah. "Only the second biggest," Sheilah purrs back, looking as if she has just said something brilliant.) And scarcely a scene goes right for Director Henry (The Bravados) King. The principals stumble around in patent and sometimes comical confusion. Deborah Kerr is a fine, sensitive actress, but when she tries to play Sheilah as a hard-lipped careerist, she looks like a nice little girl about to say boo to a goose. Gregory Peck tries painfully hard to be Fitzgerald, but manages no more than a nightclub imitation of an intellectual.
