Word: decay
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...review of the motion picture Blackboard Jungle, I am intrigued by the pronouncement that "Louis Calhern captures that special look of secret decay that can come from breathing chalk dust for 30 years [March 21]". While I am considerably short of 30 years in high-school service, I have inhaled a great deal of that insidious white stuff which produces "the secret decay." (Laymen may not know that some times after a concussion of erasers on the blackboard, the familiar mushroom cloud of dust rises high in the air and results in heavy fallout many feet from the point...
...book is divided into three part: "Why the Bulldog is Losing His Grip," "Has the Bulldog Ragained His Grip" (and apparently he hadn't), and "The Decay of Bulldogism." Bulldogism, it seems, is a sort of Yale nationalistic spirit...
Cinematically, Blackboard Jungle is no great shakes. The camera work is commonplace and the emotional pace limps. The actors do better. Glenn Ford is a believable symbol of two-fisted do-goodism; Louis Calhern captures that special look of secret decay that can come from breathing chalk dust for 30 years. Better still are the students themselves, some of whom were borrowed from their desks in the Los Angeles public school system. The sense of them there in the background has obviously provided a true emotional standard to which the professional actors, notably Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow, could repair...
Eskay Patil fired corrupt, naive and inefficient Congress ward bosses. While Nehru spoke softly abroad of Communists, Patil plastered Andhra with lurid pictures of Communist atrocities in Red China (TIME, Jan. 31). He exploited the fall of Malenkov as proof of Communist failure and decay. "Five acres per peasant -we will give you land," the Communists insistently proclaimed. "Give the Reds your vote," Eskay Patil responded, "and you give away your freedom...
...religious certainties begin to waver. Riding through the crushing heat of the jungle to a front-line outpost, he passes a ruined pagoda, and is horrified by his sudden vision of his own God "dying in the grasp of the foul, green fungus, speckled with the disease of decay." At the front Colonel Lejeune, a magnificent soldier, tells him with cold insolence that he would have preferred reinforcements to a priest. The French are corroded by defeatism, many of the soldiers are themselves Communists, the colonial troops are unreliable. In this atmosphere, Chaplain Roget's spirit is badly battered...