Word: genteel
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...Streetcar Named Desire* shows a Southern neurotic on the last lap of a downhill journey. Massed behind Blanche Du Bois are the genteel decay of her small-town forebears, the sudden suicide of her homosexual husband, the soiled annals of her nymphomaniac whoring, the loss of her reputation, her job and her home. Unable to face the truth, she has fashioned a dream world in which she is highbred, sought after and straitlaced. Her dream is her main luggage when she arrives destitute in New Orleans to "visit" her sister Stella and Stella's roughneck Polish-American husband Stanley...
Mangabeira had long sessions with close-mouthed President Dutra. In the wicker-chaired lobby of the musty-genteel Central Hotel, Army officers, party leaders and Cabinet Ministers waited their turn to join the sessions in his room. The likely outcome: an agreement to forget petty politicking in Congress and tackle the nation's considerable economic ills together. Perhaps later Brazil would have a coalition cabinet...
...Druid Circle (by John van Druten; produced by Alfred de Liagre Jr.) deals with life-or rather the awful lack of it-in a wormy provincial British university "near the borders of England and Wales." The leading spirits there are all husks and cinders, all genteel pedants dead from the neck down. Worst of all is 53-year-old Professor White (beautifully played by Leo G. Carroll), whose thin blood has turned to bile, and who hates youth pathologically, not just as something that has vanished, but as something that never came...
...Miles, who is too young to play the colonel, is not quite up to his role. Now & then the picture, probably the most intensely insular movie the British have yet exported to the U.S., becomes too clumsy or too coy; from beginning to end it is as genteel as rectory crumpets. And though none of the classical Village Types is revealed on the level of high comedy, the picture has considerable charm and humor...
...young Irishwoman who has done social work in an improved Dublin slum. Like many other social workers who make copy of their experiences, Author Robertson sometimes commits to print anecdotes and adventures that probably sounded fine at the time but, in type, only seem strained and amateurish, like a genteel effort to make a smutty-faced child blow its nose. The savor of the subject, however, often rises above her polite intentions...