Word: charming
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Margaret Storm Jameson belongs to a hard-hit generation (she calls it "the Class of 1914") and she comes from hard-bitten Yorkshire. The combination, as readers of her novels will recognize, is not one that makes for softness or cares about charm. Good if somewhat angrily honest, her stories are apt to be bitter to palates accustomed to a sugaring of the pill. In No Time Like the Present, half autobiography and half indictment of a civilization that returns to war like a dog to its vomit, there is less sugaring than ever, more anger than usual...
...were hearing things about his own business for the first time. From Senatorial wisecracks he often got large belly laughs, with his narrow blue eyes wrinkling up out of sight under bushy grey brows. With newsmen he gossiped good-naturedly, told them about his bloodstone watch charm, joked about his own importance but firmly refused to break his life-long rule against interviews...
...case the girl is flaxen-haired Lili Damita and she enters more than one beauty contest. She enters a series of them promoted by one Muldoon (Sam Hardy) in various cities, always under a different name and always subsequent to having won over the local judges by her undeniable charm. It is then unscrupulous Muldoon's cue to offer her as the prize $1,000 or a non-existent ticket to Hollywood. Until the enterprising team reaches River Falls, Miss Damita habitually chooses the ticket to Hollywood, permitting her colleague to pocket the $1,000. At River Falls...
...childhood. His father, a tutor in clasaies at Oxford, cared little for children, especially for male children, and the young boy was left pretty much to himself except when he had done wrong. But he was not a complaining child, and as he looks back, there is a melancholy charm, about his childhood that is attractive. And what he seems to have suffered from neglect, he gained in independence and self-sufficiency. Then there were always the summer holidays at Barmouth, at John o'Groat's, or on the island of Jersey, where he climbed rocks and swam with such...
Efforts to dress up the theme-by such touches as this or by having Jamil take himself a shade less seriously than the old sheiks used to do-help, not to modernize the picture, but to give it a certain wistful charm. The memory of Rudolph Valentino is still green in Hollywood. In The Sheik (1921) he coined a U. S. epithet and a mint of money for Paramount. The Barbarian is more than a belated imitation; like some of the songs which Jamil sings it is a plaintive serenade, begging audiences not to forget an old favorite. Most inevitable...