Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Badger's Den." the Japanese call it-the grim, grey, high-walled Russian embassy, which squats on a hill in Tokyo's downtown section. From alleys that lead toward it, from the windows that overlook it, Japanese police and U.S. intelligence agents keep watch on the furtive comings & goings of its 30-odd Russian inhabitants. The missions of the Russians are not diplomatic; the Japanese have not recognized the embassy since 1951, when the Soviet Union refused to ratify the Japanese peace treaty...
Next morning 4,000 university students marched in grim silence to the Puerta del Sol in front of the police head quarters building. There, squatting on the pavement to foil any police charge to disperse them, they shouted, "Down with the armed police," "Murderers." Officials anxiously telephoned for instructions...
...looked like bright heaven. Today, for a whole school of literary pessimists, it looks like unshaded hell. The harbingers of doom, headed by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four), have now been joined by Frenchman Jean Malaquais. His world of the future is as grim a nightmare as theirs. But the hero of Malaquais' The Joker is not one to surrender to a nightmare. What makes him different from most of his fictional counterparts is his unbreakable will to live...
...musical scoring, generally too loud and obvious, intensifies the horror of these struggles for food. Grim marches accompany the centipede as he hunts for his luncheon, and a horn tootles mysteriously while a red and black striped burrowing snake wriggles his body in the sand. But Disney's humor comes out in the music as well. Square dance music and hilarious narration spice a scorpion courtship...
Contrast to France. Though the crash was long in the making, it hit the Western nations with the jolt of grim surprise. Outsiders had grown accustomed to the idea that democracy had taken firm footing in postwar Italy. Over nearly eight postwar years, wily old Alcide de Gasperi, expertly pulling the strings of governmental bureaucracy and party politics, built his defeated country into a respectable, economically vigorous and politically forceful ally of the West. On the surface, Italy seemed a healthy contrast to perpetually ailing France...