Word: brac
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...they would have found Coming's 19th Century room, which looks cluttered to the 20th Century eye, just as artful and integrated as the modern exhibit. An expansive corner window, partly screened by spun-glass curtains, is the main feature of the modern room, where useless bric-a-brac has been replaced by Steuben's simple ash trays and an unconscionable quantity of crystal drinking equipment...
...characters are not copies of people but metaphors on man. They talk their heads off in cartwheeling leaps of language which in a drawing room or on a radio program would probably shatter the bric-a-brac or the microphone. But they are real: they reveal, almost with each line spoken, something of the perpetually mysterious character of human.nature; their laughter and their tears ring true; the theatricality of their action, the preposterousness of their language seem, after a while, quite as natural as a lesser theatricality, a lesser preposterousness...
...Astonished Heart (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) returns Britain's Noel Coward to the screen in the double role of scenarist and star.' For a while, it seems cause for mild celebration. Coward still handsomely fills a Mayfair drawing room with the glitter of verbal bric-a-brac. But when he begins using the stagy artifice of his comedies in behalf of a plot that combines half-baked psychiatry with bogus tragedy, even his admirers are likely to blush...