Word: charme
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Nostalgia is not what it used to be, according to antique dealers, and this scholarly and delightful volume proves them right. American Toy Cars and Trucks by Lillian Gottschalk (Abbeville; 328 pages; $75) celebrates wheels past, from 1894 to 1942, and the older these miniatures are, the more charm radiates from their wire wheels and peeling running boards. From the Jones & Bixler touring car complete with uniformed chauffeur, to the double-deck city bus populated by "clown, fireman, porter and gentleman," to the motorcycle steered by Popeye, Bill Holland's photographs offer a bright valedictory to objects that managed...
...course, he had?long since. The hasty media images by which we fed our curiosity about his years as a celebrity will fade. But the films of his younger manhood, in which his subject was not charm but its fragile and illusionary nature in a world where brutality often masquerades as farce?these will abide to delight and possibly even haunt the future. Some distant day, audiences may even come to agree with a minority of Grant's contemporaries that he was not merely the greatest movie star of his era but the medium's subtlest and slyest actor...
...years between Hollywood's make-believe headlines and the horrifying reality of Somalia, Hepburn as actress and woman seemed an emissary from a finer world than ours. She taught, by example, what a lady was: a vessel of grace and gravity, ready wit, eldritch charm: a woman whose greatest discretion was to hide her awareness of her splendor. She refused to be tyrannized by her own beauty...
...more common hurdle for a Hepburn heroine was age. Time and again, Hollywood accented her gamine charm by teaming her with male stars who could have been her father. Half of her first dozen leading men were 20 to 30 years older than she: Humphrey Bogart (54 to her 25) in Sabrina, Henry Fonda (51 to her 26) in War and Peace), Astaire (58 to her 28) in Funny Face, Gary Cooper (56 to her 28) in Love in the Afternoon, Cary Grant (59 to her 34) in Charade, Rex Harrison (56 to her 35) in My Fair Lady...
First time’s the charm...