Books: 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...