Word: genteel
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...though it sometimes took years of hot-eyed glances through barred colonial windows, and reams of brief, impassioned verses, inscribed on linen paper of powder blue and slipped under a door. ("Love! Bitter love! Pursue me no more!") But the chaperons, the sedate hot-chocolate parties and all the genteel elegance of yesteryear are being put to rout. "Ay, chica," cries 1955's blue-jeaned swain as Night and Day booms out of the record-player, "you're sweeter than an ice-cream cone and a blue sky!" The girl's fashionable ponytail bobs happily in acknowledgment...
...single things it boasts-the Negro dancing and Oliver Messel's wonderful sets and costumes-House of Flowers is a truly individual musical, to be saluted for what it possesses before being penalized for what it lacks. Truman Capote's tale of a bordello life full of genteel pretensions, and with far more high style than low instincts, has a nice rococo playfulness. Harold Arlen's score is attractive and unified, the songs delicate and unglib. About it all there hovers-despite no great amount of overt comedy-a sense of the humorous, and through...
...strikingly individual Eartha Kitt-risen from blues-singing to stardom-playing Teddy in a darting, prickling style, Mrs. Patterson has more in its favor than a sympathetic theme and a sharp approach. Yet the play as a whole is curiously flat and eventually tedious. The fault springs from nothing genteel or unhumorous in treatment: the authors squarely face Teddy's conflicts long before she does. Nor need the play's want of real movement, its mere alternations between fact and fantasy, prove fatal. But lacking outward progression, Mrs. Patterson needs real leverage of words, real voltage of imagination...
...which wins Isabel's hand, Robert Flemyng's Osmund is to perfection the egoistic tyrant the script prescribes. With Archibald's assist, however, one performance makes all the others seem drab. Cathleen Nesbitt draws from the role of Osmund's vulgar sister a vibrant bitterness which bursts from the genteel monotony of the play. Her acid interpretation, less dilute with silliness than James' conception, gives the lines a brilliance which illuminates the last two acts. In her scenes there is an eloquent portrait of a lady; the play offers no other...
...WOMAN IN BERLIN, Anonymous (319 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $4), is the stark diary of a genteel blonde who tells about her experiences during the Russians' nightmare conquest of Berlin. These experiences come down to one thing: rape. Singly and in groups, the Russians prowled through the rubble-strewn city in search of women. After being raped four times in two days, the anonymous author of the diary decided to find a strong wolf to protect her from the pack. Protection came at the customary price, first from a lieutenant, then from a major (of whom she eventually became quite...