Word: dictions
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Miss Kay Fwancis, of her melancholy moping and her distorted R's, one can only say that she is not worth listening to. Truly, the grand style of acting which strove for depth of emotion and purity of diction is gone forever. In its place is the Ibsenesque problem drama forty years late; this treats of the momentous question of what a woman should do when she does not love her husband, is being blackmailed by man, and wishes to daily with a lover. This pleases the public...
...foster-father, George Arliss is to be preferred to Maurice Chevalier (see above) on several counts. Instead of sticking out his under lip and singing, he pulls down his upper lip and speaks, in a dry tone, with perfect diction. Chevalier's picture emphasizes the good effects of dissipation; the lesson in the Arliss cinema is about the advantages of sobriety and the respect which children owe their elders. The Working Man, like most Arliss vehicles. has charm as well as respectability; if Mr. Arliss is too definitely of the old school. Bette Davis is certainly of a different...
...speaking of the new theory of poetic diction, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge made common cause, Eliot said, "It is Wordsworth's social interests which explain his criticism of the old poetic diction. Wordsworth's poetry met with no worse reception than might have been expected." Eliot recalled the time when he and Ezra Pound were called "literary bolsheviks," and said that in truth they were affirming forgotten standards rather than setting up new ones...
...spite of these interruptions, and also in spite of several irritating instances of dragging in the action, this picture of one-of-those women being evangelized and then scandalized by a self-appointed soul-healer, who combines in himself the righteousness of a Father Confessor, the diction of a bishop, the vanity of a mayor, the power of a governor, and the morals of certain other reformers one could mention (but bygones are bygones), is convincingly performed. It is comforting to see that when Joan Crawford and Walter Huston are ordered to enact a "cloudburst of passion," they not only...
...youngster propping her face against his champagne glasses, he wonders who she is. He learns that she is a Miss Healy (Constance Cummings) and that the saloon which she patronizes, out of nostalgia, was once her private residence. The elocutionist (Alison Skipworth) whom Anton hires to teach him polite diction gets drunk with a blonde beautician (Mae West), while Joe makes love to Miss Healy. Competing 'leggers try to buy his establishment and one of his old friends (Wynne Gibson) tries to re-open their relations with a revolver. What all this leads to any cinemaddict ought to know...