Word: fiendishness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...best thing about the thirties is that they are over, and we can enjoy them. Waiting for Lefty is not much over twenty years old, but already it appears naive, not to say puerile; its melodramatic politics, so characteristic of the time (coarse, pravdaically fiendish big-business villains and oppressed but upright working-class heroes) is as dated as its slang. The "Solidarity Forever" day of leftist-labor idealism are over; people who were part of them seldom like to talk about them, even before Congressional committees. In 1959 Clifford Odets' play about striking taxi drivers deserves attention largely...
Authority struck back with a fiendish plan. Trains that mutineers refused to leave were rerouted to other destinations, leaving the rebels miles from home. Twelve sit-down rebels found that their train was going backward toward its point of origin. Huffed Brian Harbour, operations chief of London Transport: "We can't stand for chaos any longer. A few people refusing to leave a train can delay thousands." Detrainment, as he called the ejection of passengers, could not be avoided.* All this was shocking news to Londoners, long proud of the Underground's superiority to the New York subway...
...monstrous Lady Bountiful, Lynn Fontanne plays with a wonderfully enameled hardness, a high-styled fiendish poise. Playing Schill in a quite different style, Alfred Lunt gives a vividly realistic picture of human fright faced with the inhumanly frightening...
...game." Weekends he stuffs his pockets with patented French fuzees and stalks about the Guinness acres (there are ten of them) waging chemical warfare on the moles. Last week, as he jabbed a poison capsule into the ground with the point of a stout stick, he cocked a fiendish eyebrow and remarked: "I feel beastly, but one of us has to go." And then back to the house to work on a script about Father Damien's leper colony-he wrote most of the scenario for The Horse's Mouth too. After The Horse's Mouth...
...most movie biography scripts, to die at the very height of one's career. Chaney did just that in 1930, after spreading his versatile voice all over his only sound movie, a talking version of The Unholy Three, in which he played both a ven- triloquist and a fiendish old lady. There was a popular gag going around at that time about insects: "Don't step on it; it may be Lon Chaney in disguise!" Chaney regarded the quip as a true com- pliment...