Word: genteelism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Theodore Dreiser, 74, pachydermatous, persistent, humorless novelist; of a heart attack; in Hollywood, shortly after completing two novels, his first in over 20 years. A titan rather than a genius, Dreiser in his amoral, sardonic first novel (Sister Carrie, 1900) ended a genteel U.S. literary tradition, cleared the way for a brutal naturalism. His greatest and best-known work, An American Tragedy, a rough-hewn milestone in U.S. letters, emphasized society's responsibility for the acts of its members...
Hopper won the $500 Logan Prize with Hotel Lobby (see cut), in which the pattern of electric light on the tired transients and commonplace interior creates an illusion of a moment stopped in time, turning the genteel lobby into a monument of weariness and melancholy. Born 63 years ago, tall (6 ft. 4 5/8 in.), quiet Edward Hopper started slowly, hit his stride after 40. His plain pictorial statements of what he sees are so authoritatively final that some critics regard him as a U.S. master...
...proceedings were conducted in an atmosphere reminiscent of a Southern female academy, vintage 1845. Super-chaperones shooed off men, warned each of the 40 contestants not to drink, smoke or chew gum. Stiffly genteel throughout, the chaperones simply ignored a man with field glasses who peered from a nearby sundeck into the solarium of the Senator Hotel when the girls assembled there (fully clothed). At one point the young ladies were inducted into a "sorority" called Mu Alpha Sigma, which was invented by the contest directors solely for Miss America entrants. Its motto: Modesty, Ambition, Success...
...improvisations suggested by the famed, funereal painting of Swiss Romanticist Arnold Bocklin. Quarantined on a tomb-haunted island off the Grecian coast, after one of them dies of the plague, is a strange crew, including a Greek general (Boris Karloff), a sinister peasant woman (Helene Thimig), a genteel Englishman (Alan Napier), his sickly wife (Katherine Emery), their full-blown servant girl (Ellen Drew). For a while, with deliberate restraint, the movie is content to trail red herrings, tune up its infernal machinery and suggest perhaps a few too many moral and psychological implications. Tensions grow as the characters develop...
What makes "Colonel Blimp" stretch to 146 minutes is its tremendous scope, its three generation historical footnote to the Law burlesque. Beginning called Clive Candy through out of the Bear War, the picture plumps down a punch bowl full of a atmosphere, all very English and very genteel. This was when wars were just "Summer maneuvers" so far as most people were concerned, and the British military set were having a dandy old time...