Word: familiarizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BEEN ages since I last saw you," I said to the figures on the screen at the opening moments of The Whales of August. The actors were all familiar, but from bygone eras. The last film I had seen starring Lillian Gish was made before the advent of talking pictures, and Bette Davis's heyday passed long before I was born. Although I had seen Vincent Price regularly as the host of PBS's Mystery, he too had faded from the movie screen...
Mikhail Gorbachev. The name, the beaming, birthmarked visage and the outstretched, crowd-caressing hand have become so familiar in the past 33 months that it is difficult to remember the man's predecessors.Vague images come to mind of stone-faced figures frozen in mid-frown atop the Lenin Mausoleum. Gargoyles in fur hats. Perhaps Gorbachev's most obvious accomplishment is that he has reinvented the idea of a Soviet leader. Virtually everything about his country and its place in world affairs seems less ponderous, less opaque than it did before he became General Secretary of the Communist Party...
...plays that tower over American drama -- Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night -- Our Town is at once the most universally familiar and the most widely misunderstood. Audiences tend to recall Wilder's glimpse of small-town, turn-of-the-century New Hampshire as sweet, sentimental, nostalgic and funny. It was all those things. But it was also -- and remains, 50 years after its first public performances in January 1938 -- groundbreakingly unconventional in form and chafingly unsettling...
Most film buffs are familiar with the loony malapropisms of Producer Samuel Goldwyn, such as "Include me out" and "I read part of it all the way through." But how many remember when Goldwyn and his competitor Jack Warner co-produced the following wonderful gaffe? At a postwar banquet for Britain's war hero Field Marshal Montgomery, Goldwyn rose and proposed a toast to "Marshall Field Montgomery." After a stunned silence, Warner corrected him, "Montgomery Ward, you mean...
Levi is obsessed with the structure of complicity that made the Lagers run. The camps were literally concentrated worlds where pain, humiliation, fear and base human nature were intensified. To the familiar images of families tumbling out of boxcars to be greeted officially by insults and clubbings, Levi adds the reception that older prisoners gave to new arrivals. "Rarely was a newcomer received, I won't say as a friend but at least as a companion- in-misfortune; in the majority of cases, those with seniority . . . showed irritation or even hostility...