Word: frightener
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...real life. But it is the special nature of the theatre to raise emotions to higher power, somewhat simplifying, somewhat exaggerating, but tremendously intensifying. Playwright Hellman makes her plot crouch, coil, dart like a snake; lets her big scenes turn boldly on melodrama. Melodrama has become a word to frighten nice-nelly playwrights with; but, beyond its own power to excite, it can stir up genuine drama of character and will. Like the dramatists of a hardier day, Lillian Hellman knows this, capitalizes on it, brilliantly succeeds...
Hero Lindbergh's friends in Berlin have indeed given him rare chances to look with a knowing eye at German armaments and more important, into the laboratories where German researchers find new ways to build and kill. Hitler & Co. being anxious to frighten Great Britain and France before Munich, it is more than likely that his reports on German air strength which repolished his reputation last week were the same which helped to tarnish it a few weeks earlier. Certainly the German Government knew, if the U. S. public had forgotten, that Colonel Lindbergh is still an officer...
...legend of Don Juan was invented by a Spanish monk in the 16th Century nominally in order to frighten young profligates into piety. In the original the sensuous, rakehell Don kills the father of Doña Ana, one of the girls he has violated. Later he invites the father's statue to sup with him. The statue comes, demands that Juan repent his many sins. Don Juan refuses, is snatched down into Hell...
...like Roman emperors" and leaping at one another "like fighting cocks." More than 25,000 curious Parisians had watched them last fortnight in the Parc des Princes. Gendarmes were called out to handle 2,000 people who tried to crash the gate. "The giants kneeled down and tried to frighten one another with grimaces, then rushed headlong at one another. . . . Legs and arms got so mixed that the field, strewn with wounded players, looked like a battleground after the charge...
...horses ("Think of it. We have no tails to dock, no checkreins, no whips, no blinders, no sore backs") and at one stage in the gasoline buggy's development he even considered building a buggy with a tractor unit shaped like a horse in order not to frighten real horses in traffic...