Word: arliss
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Television, however, in its new fondness for "docu-dramas," is subject to special danger of another sort. People who go to a moviehouse expect to see fiction and accept the conventions of historical drama: no one is much worse off if everyone's image of Disraeli is George Arliss or if Gregory Peck romanticizes the legend of Douglas MacArthur. But, as a number of psychologists have pointed out, the television screen provides most people with their visual knowledge of real events, such as President Kennedy's assassination, so that truth and show-biz demands are bound...
...Avenue, Woody Allen remains as curious as the next man-and the next man, he worries, is tapping the phone and peering through the keyhole. The pad is neoclassic Allen. The windows have been widened, the duplex thoroughly decorated ("It looks," says Cavett, "like the set for the George Arliss movie, The Man Who Played God"). On the terrace, the meticulously arranged Japanese garden features live plants and coiled-up rubber snakes to frighten away the pigeons. One afternoon, a rubber snake fell from the terrace and landed on a lady below. She sued, of course...
Also, I knew the Baptist church tower, theme of the artist's Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night. That church tower was a masterpiece of Victorian gimcrackery. It was so downright, honestly ugly that, like George Arliss, it was positively beautiful. The sound of its bell, to paraphrase Poe, was "In the startled ear of night/ How it screamed out its affright!" I think that old tower perhaps may have had a soul, and Burchfield, like William Blake, was able to commune with such spirits...