Word: cicadas
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...Sable Cicada (Hsin Hwa Motion Picture Co.). In 1938. foreign pictures, by & large, were better than Hollywood pictures. In 1939, U. S. audiences will doubtless see more foreign pictures of all sorts than ever before. Sable Cicada, released in Manhattan last fortnight, is one of the first Chinese pictures made for foreign devils as well as for domestic showings. Likely to be shown only in a few small theatres in big cities, it is nevertheless important as a symptom of an ambassadorial trend...
...Chinese companies make pictures in Cantonese (South China) dialect, two in classical Mandarin (North China) dialect. Chinese movie stars are borrowed from the Chinese stage and music halls. Average picture-production cost is about $15,000. Invasion by Japan has not interrupted Chinese cinema production. While Sable Cicada, which took two years to make, was in production at Shanghai, the studio was bombed twice. (Studio officials kept blueprints of the sets so that, in case of serious damage, they could be promptly rebuilt...
Most Chinese pictures concern contemporary domestic life, contain a derby-&-mustache stock character derived from Charlie Chaplin. Sable Cicada, however, is a $125,000 superproduction about doings of the Han dynasty in the Third Century...
...plump, grey-haired Lady Lindsay, wife of moose-tall Ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay. Lady Lindsay suggested telephoning to the Department of Agriculture. One of the Department's entomologists told the worried gardener that the insects were part of a huge and famed brood-Brood X-of periodical cicadas known scientifically as Tibicina septendecim and popularly as "17-year-locusts." The entomologist said that the insects would do little or no harm to flowers and shrubs, would make a fearful racket later on when they began to mate. Meanwhile there was nothing to do. If the gardener insisted on keeping...
September smelts its autumnal ore in skies of glowing gold. The cicada shrills, a drowsy not steals into the crickets' chime, elm leaves rust toward the pensive melancholy of their yellowing. Such rites of the year's decay are reminders of the academic year's renewal. It is time to go back to school, and this week six hundred lucky Harvard undergraduates, having returned to their studies, live in two of the most stately new schoolhouses over built in America, houses so beautiful one would think that after having once lived in them the rest of life would be exile...