Of & For Hollywood

NOTHING So STRANGE (308 pp.)--James Hi fan--Little, Brown ($2.75).

Writing for the screen, Author James Hilton once remarked, could do a man no harm. It might, he said, actually be a good thing, in keeping him keenly alive to story values. Novelist Hilton has spent the best part of a dozen years in Hollywood since Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips brought him fame and passage from England. Nothing So Strange (the title derives from Daniel Webster: "There is nothing so powerful as truth--and often nothing so strange") is certainly alive to story values--in the movie sense--besides being the Literary Guild selection for November.

Hollywood, which is said to be dickering for the novel, should be able to cast this machine-turned story in roughly five minutes. Gregory Peck would be a natural for the lean, dedicated young atomic scientist. Dorothy McGuire would be the girl who cures him of a wartime neurosis and ultimately wins his love; Walter Huston her fabulously wealthy father with entry into every embassy in Europe; and, possibly, Sidney Greenstreet as a Nazi physicist who swipes a valuable discovery from the scientist.

The book is replete with convenient flashbacks of the kind the cinema loves, and the story moves effortlessly from London to Vienna to California, affording many an opportunity for many a stock shot. Its sentiments are eminently correct for the movies, with one exception. When the hero first meets the heroine and her mother, he goes briefly for the mother--but that angle could easily be cut out of the script. Love finally conquers all as The Bomb falls on Hiroshima. Running time: 90 minutes.

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