Word: bel
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Died. Ernst Lubitsch, 55, roguish ("Puck with a cigar") movie producer-director who got his famed "Lubitsch touch" from the late wunderbare Producer-Director Max Reinhardt and left it on a score of sophisticated implausibilities (Monte Carlo, Ninotchka, Cluny Brown); of a heart ailment; in Bel-Air, Calif. Lubitsch, whose German-made Gypsy Blood and Passion brought Emil Jannings, Pola Negri and a grace-note style of cinema comedy to the U.S. in 1919, was one of the first European directors to earn-and keep-Hollywood's cash-&-carry respect...
Atabrine & DDT. Soon UNESCO's scientists will go to Belém, at the Amazon's broad mouth, to start their institute work. As the program gets under way, they will move upstream, analyzing the soil, trying to find out what man may do with it and himself in the heat and rain. Here & there they will come upon other pith-helmeted, mosquito-booted men laden with atabrine, DDT bombs, boxed instruments, and closely guarded notes. These are the geologists of the major oil companies looking for petroleum lands. Ever since Peru's Ganso Azul (Blue Goose...
...faith in humanity, which many people may find hard to take, is personified agreeably in Barbara Bel Geddes, who is convincingly charming and pure in her film debut. The thorn in the side of Fonda and Bel Geddes's true love, velvet-smooth Vincent Price, complicates the plot by trying to seduce the girl and torture Fonda with an induced inferiority complex. For you see, he is but a working man, who little understands the complicated nature of woman. It takes a while, but Fonda finally realizes that the ladies are as simple as he had thought, and that everyone...
Price plays magnificently, Fonda competently, and Bel Geddes sweetly. The villain, a conjurer who tries to hypnotize the young people, has some of the over-dramatic flair of John Barrymore, and is by far the most fascinating character in the movie, while Ann Dvorak, as a friend who rebels from him, does nicely in her role of a DP, or disenchanted person...
What is exasperating about all this is that the novel so gapingly succumbs to the pompous middle-class standards of its own characters. Inflated Bel, a meddling woman busily climbing the social ladder; dough-mouthed Mungo and his horsy noble-blooded bride; rattle-brained David unable to decide between love and honor-these ciphers are fondled by Scottish Author McCrone as if they were creatures whose experience had intrinsic significance and value...