Word: benign
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Three Smart Girls (Universal). Under Carl Laemmle Sr., Universal Pictures Corp. made a specialty of horror pictures. Last spring when benign old "Uncle Carl," who had generously padded his staff with relatives, sold the company he had founded, Banker John Cheever Cowdin and his associates, who bought it, promised profound changes. As an example of what to expect from an alert group of hard-boiled banker-showmen, Three Smart Girls should interest exhibitors. Universal's most ballyhooed 1936 release is the daintiest, quaintest, most hygienic little musicomedy of the season, written, directed and performed with such evident sincerity that...
...Romagna (Burgess Meredith) gets a clue 15 years later when he learns from a newspaper clipping that Garth - suspected at the time of knowing something about the murder - was never called as a witness. To the dank tenement under an East River bridge where Garth is living with his benign old father (Maurice Moscovitch) and his innocent young sister (Margo), Mio goes one rainy win ter night to learn what Garth can tell...
...along intellectual rather than social lines. House libraries, the selection of the tutorial staffs and especially careful selection of entering concentrators could all be brought to bear on developing this trend. Discussion groups or societies, instigated and continued by, the students themselves, could be fostered and stimulated by the benign interests of resident members of the faculty. Outside lecturers might be called in, dinners held and opportunities taken to maintain such a tradition, if once started. Indeed, ample means could be found to preserve house personalities and cherish them once the initial impulse had been given; with the final result...
...grotesquely exaggerated pictorial humor which had made him rich & famed. In place of the hilarious daily strip which the McNaught Syndicate was happily selling far & wide, "Rube" Goldberg offered a serious, human-interest character named Doc Wright, similar in tone but not in inspiration to Gasoline Alley's benign Walt Wallet. Within ten months, the solemn doings of Doc Wright were beginning to bore Artist Goldberg as much as they did many a reader. Though Doc Wright still appeared in more than zoo papers, independently wealthy Artist Goldberg quit drawing altogether, devoted full time to his writing instead...
...contemporary sentimental fiction, the benign character of the aged grandmother who holds the family together, counsels the young, comforts the wretched and looks out upon life's kaleidoscopic panorama with eyes dimmed but kindly, has become one of the most popular characters in stock. But in Great Laughter Fannie Hurst has created an aged grandmother who seems destined to end ail aged grandmothers in popular fiction. In comparison with her, the teetering representatives of the oldest generation in the Jalna novels of Mazo de la Roche are just so many leaping adolescents, the doddering Forsytes of John Galsworthy...