Word: dago
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Joseph Valentine (Guiseppe Valentino), who calls himself a "dago wop," has followed Deanna Durbin's cinema growth from a pup. Most great reputations in the business are built on subdued arty effects -the specialties of Toland, Gaudio and chunky Chinese James Wong Howe-but Valentine has won his colors with gaiety. The lilt he catches in the gait of Deanna Durbin swinging along, singing a song, is the difference between making a musical bright and fluffy or allowing it to settle like cold soufflé. Dark, athletic, with a Cupid's-bow mustache, Valentine is a leader...
Another U. S. folk group, the Italian-Americans, preoccupies John Fante, author of Wait Until Spring, Bandini in Dago Red (Viking; $2.50). It is perhaps 1940's best book of short stories: the sort many people wish that William Saroyan, with a grip on himself at last, would write. With the emotional richness of his race and his Church, Fante writes mostly of his childhood-First Communion, baseball ambitions, parochial schools, his volatile father, long-suffering mother-always an easier trick than to write well of the adult world. But his best tale, "A Wife for Dino Rossi...