Word: evening
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Distinction. Admen, in league with psychology, following charts marshaled by armies of researchers, plotted a never-ceasing campaign to capture the public's attention, and stab to the psychological soft spots of men & women. They appealed to fear ("Even your best friends won't tell you"), to snobbery ("Men of Distinction"), to romance ("She's lovely, she's engaged, she uses Pond's"). They spoke in euphemisms, wrapped like cotton around the harsh facts of life, and invented dread new diseases (B.O., Office Hips, Halitosis). They found that endorsements by real people, from tobacco auctioneers...
...Even if a girl is accepted by one of New York's 23 agencies (the best known: Powers, Conover, Thornton, Hartford, Ford), it is still a long road to a magazine cover or a four-color ad. Most agencies register far more models than they can possibly place, are little more than clearinghouses which keep the models' bookings, relay telephone messages, give them a place to sit around and wait between jobs, and collect 10% of their fees. It is usually the model who has to sell herself, tramping in & out of photographers' studios, showing her scrapbook...
...everywhere; she smiles down from mountains and from steely skyscraper façades, from billboards and from the most exclusive bars. She is no longer an enticing stranger; the American is fond of her, sometimes irritated by her, but he takes her for granted and looks for her, even when he has no intention of buying what she is selling...
...Public Enemy -no audience-deafening gun blasts, no close-ups of the killer's eyes or of the sickening sprawl of the corpse. The new brutality is streamlined. .White Heat is sprinkled with an improved type of wrist action in blackjacking, so effective that the camera does not even bother to examine the victim. The traditional movie chase, with its essentially simple machinery, has evolved into a studious, highly technical battle in which the combatants use telephones, oscillators, triangulation equipment and poker faces...
...conscious Director Walsh can set up a trivial shot of gangsters listening to a car radio in a windswept mountain lideout, and make grey weather, the texture of trees and the vitality of the figures add up to visual pleasure. An unaffected director of home and bedroom scenes, he even manages, without bathos or leer, to jet away with a shot of Cagney sitting on lis mother...