Word: destroyed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Pity, or what Scobie thinks of as pity, proceeds inexorably to destroy him. A young girl, survivor of a torpedoed ship, is carried into his life on a stretcher, and rather than let her innocence be corrupted by a promiscuous R.A.F. pilot, Scobie becomes her adulterous protector. Blackmailed by the Syrian loan-shark, Scobie, who cannot bear to let his wife suffer, buys off the Syrian by helping him to smuggle diamonds through the British blockade...
...standard Hollywood treatment, i.e., the daydreamer is now an heiress and her moderately subtle character is interpreted, with full brass, by rambunctious Betty Hutton. Playing her bookish boy friend, Macdonald Carey behaves more like the president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. All in all, the movie manages to destroy the original play's tenderness and its moral ("facts are better than dreams"*). Dream Girl gets by, with little to spare, on the strength of some frantically energetic scenes showing Betty as a flaming señorita, as a South Seas trollop and as Madame Butterfly...
Malaya seemed to have gone berserk. Arson had become commonplace. Workers battled police with spears and picks. Posters cried: "Destroy those who work for other races." Sir Edward Gent, High Commissioner of the Malay Federation, proclaimed a state of emergency, granted extraordinary powers to the police...
...guessed it. It was the British Lion. He must have run off to help the Arabs destroy Jerusalem...
Friendly Erosion. Erosion is another menace that Dr. Kellogg thinks has been oversold. Some soils erode badly, he says, but others do not, even on steep, long-cultivated slopes. Great gullies cutting through a field destroy its value, but gradual erosion does little harm and may even be beneficial. When the topsoil washes gradually away, the subsoil may turn into topsoil with renewed fertility. "Much [erosion]," says Dr. Kellogg, "is a perfectly normal concomitant of mountain building and wearing down ... An important part is essential to the formation of productive soils. One cannot, or should not, try to stop erosion...