Word: grading
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...editor of The Clearing House, a secondary-school journal, was tired of complaints that school kids learned fundamentals better in the good old days. He didn't believe it. Last week Editor Forrest Long said it wasn't so: measured by a ninth-grade examination given in 1846, youngsters of 1947 had proved a little better taught than their great-grandparents in spelling, a lot better in arithmetic...
...which makes this picture entertaining. It is smartly directed by Michael Gordon. Mr. Price, with his sloping charm and his foulard voice, is just what a really villainous Wall Street operator ought 'to look like. Ella Raines has a lot of sneering snap as the kind of top-grade personal secretary whq works a 168-hour week. Edmond O'Brien shows enough honest heelishness, and little enough hard-boiled mawkishness, to be one of the most likable of the tough young thriller heroes who move into Evil's den and drag it out by the short hair...
...When she collapses, Miss Crawford is taken to a psychopathic ward. By the time the psychiatrist's drugs loosen her locked tongue enough to tell her story, Joan's desperate beauty and her fine, florid movie personality have aroused an intensity of interest which only a top grade picture could satisfy...
Possessed is not quite top grade, but most of it is filmed with unusual imaginativeness and force...
Only living U.S. authors to make the grade: John Steinbeck (a reissue of The Grapes of Wrath), Upton Sinclair (the Lanny Budd cycle), Ralph Ingersoll (Top Secret), Elliott Roosevelt (As He saw It), Erskine Caldwell, whose short stories about the seamy side of Southern life will top all other U.S. offerings with a 100,000-copy edition. Said the director of one Moscow publishing house last week: "We didn't see anything else that would interest Soviet readers...