Word: gasps
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Goethe, young Arthur Schopenhauer's hysterical bluestocking sister, Goethe's tortured, psychically castrated, piteous son-and its equally unpleasant effects upon a whole household and community. The exquisite, shriveling protocols of the formal luncheon are established with a finality, a bland cruelty, at which Marcel Proust might gasp...
When Lydia Chippman was 15 she was sent away from home. She was never told why. At 35, returning, she deeply needed to know what no one would tell her, and stared, through enigmas, relics, last-gasp confessions, upon the gradual flowering of her parents' dreadful past. Some feminine passages may give masculine readers the fantods. Yet the novel as a whole has the exquisite gentleness and exactitude, and the fascination, which reside in the proper treatment of an elaborate wound...
Said Here and Now's editorial leader: "Critics [of the Younger Generation] gasp at jitterbugging, forgetting completely those 'immoral' gyrations that 30 years ago were the turkey trot, the grizzly bear and the bunny hug. They wring their hands as they view the diminutive church attendance. . . . One wonders why more of them are not seen in church. . . . The kids of today don't have the real stuff anymore,' they say self-appreciatingly. 'Why, when I was young, do you think . . .?' and so on ad infinitum. When we are looked upon in such manner...
...There is no plot--which is to be expected in a Fields picture--and the supporting cast of Joseph Calleia, Dick Foran, Donald Meek, and Anne Nagel are left to shifts for themselves. But there is no lack of action. Mae West, as the siren Flower Belle of Last Gasp Saloon, stages a fake marriage with Guthbert J. Twillie, in order to become a "decent lady," and then floors fidelity. Fields spends his time quaffing alcoholic beverages, gambling with stacked cards, and coining such phrases as "I perceive there mist be an Ethiopian in the fuel supply...
...them from the storm scud, Germany's air war on British shipping is a very real and horrid thing. Machine-gun fire sweeps the deck, bombs blow the ship apart, men are hurled mangled and stunned into the combers, the ship goes down leaving survivors to flounder and gasp and freeze until help comes, if it does...