Word: backdrop
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...really mind because he knows that some day he is going to own a share in the firm and marry old Mr. Chevalier's niece. Before he succeeds, readers have been given a lively picture of U.S. business and municipal mores at their most ruggedly individualistic-against a backdrop of clipper ships, teeming wharves, swells, belles, fire fighting, and the Five Points gang wars...
...land and oil booms of the 1880s and '90s, the leaning fences and signboards of the 19205. The 1941 display pictured children playing in congested streets, oil wells blossoming on front lawns. A weatherbeaten shack, transplanted whole from a Los Angeles slum, stood accusingly before a backdrop of Los Angeles' skyscraping city hall...
...Stalin: "We have here a wonderful Georgian." Nor could he forget Lenin's final repudiation of him as too "crude and narrow-minded" four months before Lenin's death. But gradually he had created a new Lenin of his own, a legend to be his own backdrop. He could afford in 1939 to be one of the sad-faced bearers of the ashes of Lenin's widow; he now can face Lenin's death mask in his office. For Lenin was now a shapeless memory, a symbol of Moscow, of life itself...
...must wield with force and repetition. Some of his dialogues, about nothing in particular, seem interminable. The significance of Ellen Rogers is not in its writing but in the fact that here for the first time Farrell has contracted his view from social to individual conflicts, against the backdrop of a higher social milieu. He has succeeded after a fashion, like a strong but clumsy pugilist who beats down his opponent with 15 rounds of body blows...
...settings are perhaps the play's greatest virtue, but they lack subtlety, and tend to stand out by themselves, as original and dramatic, rather than taking their proper place as a backdrop for the action of the play...