Word: babylons
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...Green Pastures. The black shepherds of the South make the Bible stories real to their flocks. Since the Southern Negro does not possess a learned, historic imagination, he envisions Scriptural events in terms of his own life. But the sinful city of Babylon is nonetheless real to him because he conceives it to have resembled a series of Negro nightclubs. Nor is the Lord God any less credible because he is imagined as working, like all important beings, in an office with a rolltop desk. From such humble visions, welling out of the fervid spirit of the black man. Playwright...
...walls are hung with crimson banners, like those in Sunday Schools, proclaiming the glory and power of Egypt in the best Negroid rhetoric. After Moses has been called to his heavenly home, the world is again steeped in sin. When the Lord God visits a jazz cellar in Babylon, so outraged is he that he repents of his creation and resigns mankind to perdition. But the prophet Hosea inspires faith in his followers together with sympathy born of suffering. Beholding his works, the Lord God's attitude changes accordingly, and, at another fish-fry within the pearly gates...
...Babylon (Amkino). In mood and technique, this makes pictures like General Crack look like amateur theatricals, but it is inferior as entertainment. The difference is a matter of intention. The Amkino producers were not interested in making this product salable but in expressing a dogma passionately clear and important to the patriots of new Russia. The setting in France of 1870 is adventitious. The storyless argument lacks sequence. The vivid symbolism, used at first coherently to show what happened in the rebellion that followed the German invasion, becomes disordered and tedious. Best shot: French troops stimulated to attack doomed rebels...
Caucasian Love (Amkino). There is further angry propaganda in this one, directed now at the Cossacks whom the Tsar sent to drive the people of Tersk out of their village. The situation is presented less consciously and vehemently than in The New Babylon (see above). Good shots: the illiterate Chechens signing a document by pressing it with thumbs first rubbed on a sooty pot; a crowd of people on a mountain road; villagers squatting with bowed heads in the road as they await a charge by cavalry...
Died. Minor Cooper Keith, 81, of Babylon, L. I., founder of United Fruit Co., president_ of International Railways of Central America; at Babylon...