Word: distorter
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...simplest of plots and three extremely capable actors, Zoltan Korda has transformed Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" into a first-rate motion picture. While the sparsely-worded, continually charged atmosphere of the original story has been preserved, the script-writers have only had to distort the plot a little to squeeze ninety minutes of movie out of thirty pages of tightly-written dialogue. The only place they slipped up was at the end, where long, out-of character explanations take the edge off Hemingway's subtlety...
...important fact about cycles, say Dewey & Dakin, is that world wars, depressions and other economic cataclysms do not seem to change the rhythms. They may distort them, i.e., a cycle may go higher or lower, but its basic length is not changed...
...said Professor Garrett Mattingly of Manhattan's Cooper Union, "recognize the tendency of the emotionally naive ... to distort history into patriotic legend. But these obvious perversions are not really dominant. . . . What does need correction is another form of cultural isolationism which is spreading in this country. I mean our increasing preoccupation with our national past, so that history, in the U.S., is coming to mean almost exclusively the history of the U.S." New York City, he said, now teaches twice as much U.S. history as 25 years...
Like most good things, "Stairway" rings the bell on the note of its unexpected freshness and intellectual maturity. Where most producers manage to distort the elementary love story into a complicated and painfully dime novel entanglement, writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Press-burger have restored this favorite theme to its original charm and simplicity...
...Beatrix Potter "knew it was quite unnecessary to distort animals and make them 'funny' in order to touch the imagination of a child. On the contrary, it was their very beauty, and the seriousness and reality of their little world, which had held her entranced through the long summer holidays of her own childhood." Some of the animals in the illustrations of the Potter Tales are set in their frames with the dignity and charm of aristocrats in old English miniatures...