Word: bastardize
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Fictionalized biography is at best a bastard literary form, at worst as silly and hoked-up as, say, U.S. cinema's recent contribution to the biography of Frederic Chopin, A Song to Remember. The American is a sober, workmanlike job, but it suffers from the acute schizophrenia common to all work of its kind. The biographical and historical detail limit its interest as story. The choice of facts and the touches of literary fancy work limit its value as biography. Novelist Fast knows facts when he sees them, treats them respectfully, arrays most of those relating to Altgeld...
...Each His Own (Paramount) is a double helping of expertly stewed, exquisitely served corn. The film allows its heroine (Olivia de Havilland) to give birth to a bastard, in the hallowed melodramatic tradition of Way Down East. But the fact that Miss de Havilland and the audience are required to suffer & suffer & suffer during the balance of a feature-length lifetime makes it all up to Hollywood for her moment of indiscretion...
...half of his 65 years, John James Audubon did not appear to be destined for anything in particular. The bastard son of a French sea captain and a Santo Domingo Creole, he grew up in France when Jean Jacques Rousseau's back-to-nature notions were the rage. Sent to America to seek his fortune (as overseer of his father's estate near Philadelphia), young Audubon looked and acted like an absentminded candidate for the horsy...
...getting a bit old -oughter keep his trap shut!" growled a waterfront voice. Up piped a soldier: "He's done a damned good job for us in America, almost as good as he did during the war." A dockhand yelled: "Chuck him in the sea, the old bastard...
...amazement, expecting to find these common men of the German Navy a beaten lot, I found arrogance and firm belief in Nazi doctrine. Peculiarly, Goring was referred to as "that bastard." In the midst of my enlightenment a Kraut C.P.O. stuck his neck through the watertight door intoning in guttural Low German the fear that I was a reporter-"Seid still!" Why do we continue to fail so miserably? (NAVY ENSIGN'S NAME WITHHELD) Philadelphia