THE RECREATION HALL

The Recreation Hall in a small town, St. Johns Landing, south of Washington, is a neutral grain spirits nirvana for some of life's losers. If copping out is their original sin, self pity is the secondary one. Among the habitues of this haunt are Mrs. Josephine DuPays, an outright alcoholic; Semi, a former Colonel in the Nazi S.S., later recruited as an agent by the U.S., and Harry Cornell, who gets drunk on Saturday nights in order to try and bed his wife Delila. She blames and shames him each time. But now he falls in love with Carolyn, another chafed spirit, and they spend some time intimately, return to the Landing to lacerate each other while Delila is killed (rape-murder) and Harry is charged.... Jessup, if you remember The Cincinnati Kid, can tell a tense, transient story in a tight-lipped fashion any pro can admire; if, like its characters, it has no real values (in spite of a few random remarks about love and loss, default and delusion) it still does manage a considerable impetus. This implies, as it should, that it reads very easily and it could be photogenic.