Word: gaslighters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that is changed. St. Louis finally has a place to go at night, and the place is Gaslight Square. A three-block oasis of nostalgic frivolity where some 50 gaudily atmospheric taverns, cabarets, restaurants and antique shops are packed together in fine, fin de siècle jumble, it combines a sort of Disneyland quaintness with the gaiety of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens and the innocent naughtiness of Gay Nineties' beerhalls...
From the first, Gaslight Square attracted a fair share of mink coats along with turtleneck sweaters and black stockings. Then the latter took on a different look as proprietors required customers to wear coats and ties. Says one cabaret owner: "We give a buck's worth of booze for a buck. And no strolling, lonely chicks. Once you start letting that happen, you are in for trouble." Today, the Square has no strippers, no gyp joints, lots of good clean gaslit...
Pioneers in the Gaslight Square venture are the Mutrux brothers, Dick and Paul. In the early '50s, they bought the old Musical Arts Building (here Miss Bess Morse once operated an "expression school," where Tennessee Williams and William Inge put on some of their first plays) and opened up a colorful saloon called the Gaslight. The neighborhood then was a collection of seedy secondhand stores and a community of couldn't-care-less flat dwellers. Following the Mutrux brothers was self-styled "Environmental Engineer" Jimmy Massucci, who opened up another saloon, the Golden Eagle, near by; then...
Producer Julian Blaustein has translated his tale from World War I to World War II, but too often he retains a dated atmosphere of glamour-by-gaslight. Hero Ford, a playboy from Argentina, falls pampassionately in love with Heroine Thulin, a Parisienne married to a patriotic editor. When the editor joins the Resistance, the hero realizes his duty and secretly does the same. Unaware of his decision, the heroine decides that he is merely a lightweight, and goes back to her husband. At the fade, while the violins soar among the bomb bursts, the poor misunderstood playboy dies heroically...
...Victorian England, island swelled into Empire, man's origins retreated from Adam to ape, man's progress advanced to antitoxins and turbines. But certainly, too, there was a precipitous drop from Disraeli to pestilent drains or from Darwin to shivering streetwalkers. Characteristically, it was an age of gaslight, which lighted the dark with a baleful glare, but produced furtive, disquieting shadows...