Word: genteelisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Southern Exposure is one of those little jobs that lay everything on too thick and yet seem pathetically thin. The spoofing is as primitive as the objects of it are genteel; the romance, though it would seem recklessly swift in real life, seems endless on the stage. But the root trouble with the play is its mediocre writing. Satire just as broad and boy-meets-girl stuff just as corny have clicked as popular entertainment by dint of bright and lively lines. Playwright Crump will have to get on with his dialogue if he hopes to make good...
Mark Twain would have liked A Stretch on the River, but not Mark's genteel wife Livy. The fact is that Deck Hand Bill Joyce thought and talked mostly about women and so did Joe, the second mate...
...underworld boss who values his reputation for homicide in the Chicago of 1928, Douglas is a softie who puts his victims out of circulation by imprisoning them comfortably in his cellar. He falls for genteel Governess Jean Peters ("a dame with class"), persuades her to take charge of a pint-sized guttersnipe whom he forces to pose as his son. Jean turns out to be an aspiring singer who can wiggle her assets on a nightclub floor-and switch right back to being as prim as Little Red Riding Hood. Douglas' problem: to go straight for her sake without...
...jargon of the police. Instead of the familiar "Calling all cars," Dragnet uses the duller but truer "Attention all units," making sure that it is accompanied by a rush of air through the microphone (called a "squelch"), because most police radio dispatchers' are not educated in the genteel phases of commercial broadcasting...
...Philadelphia Main Line was perhaps the most splendid suburb since Louis XIV's real-estate development at Versailles. That day is past. Many of the estates have been broken into petty parcels, many of the great homes torn down or converted into genteel academies. The grandsons of the great generation have not exactly returned to shirtsleeves, but they are catching the 8:24 instead...