Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Frenchmen took special pride in paying off $200 million on a debt to the International Monetary Fund ahead of schedule, piled up their first trade surplus with the U.S. in 60 years, and grew so confident that one Belgian banker remarked: "The French no longer have an inferiority complex growing out of their defeat in the war and their economic troubles. In fact, they have just the opposite...
...industrialization called forth new skills, the French workingman's average pay jumped 60% (to $80 monthly) in a decade; Danes and Norwegians average 84? an hour, v. 42? ten years ago, while Swedes get a minimum $1.16 an hour, v. 50? an hour in 1948. The British secretary who once considered herself lucky to draw $1,100 annually can command better than $2,800 in 1959. The sums may not be princely by U.S. standards, but they are enough to open up a new way of life...
...Miller lampoons the shock of the American tourist upon first encountering a Paris pissoir, adding: "I do not find it so strange that America placed a urinal in the center of the Paris exhibit at Chicago. I think it belongs there, and I think it a tribute which the French should appreciate. True, there was no need to fly the Tricolor above it." Oddly enough, the best piece is Miller's account of how, a little squiffed from cognac, he told the story of Goldilocks to his children. "One day the grizzly bear was out gathering wood...
Black Orpheus (French). Director Marcel Camus (no kin to Novelist-Playwright Albert) has fashioned an impressive, poetic film from an adaptation of the Orpheus legend. The unknown Negro cast, the graceful transformation of the original, and the breathtaking image presented of life as a tropical carnival earned it the 1959 Grand Prix at Cannes...
...Blows (French). The story of a small boy's flight from the soiled, loveless world of his parents adds up to a moving metaphor for all humanity trapped in the relentless round of daily life...