Word: guignol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...everybody. Seldom has such art been concentrated so deliberately with-in four walls as in an anti-war exhibition at Paris' Galerie Billiet last fortnight, called L'Art Cruel. The usual fate of such intentions has seldom been illustrated better than in the shallow frissons and Grand Guignol giggles with which swank Parisians responded to it. Contributors of the 48 paintings included Picasso, with his nightmarish Dreams & Lies of Franco (TIME, Dec. 27); Salvador Dali, with The Specter of Sex Appeal, in which a nai've little boy regards an enormous figure, half-flesh, half-bone, straddling...
...dabbler in dilettantish restraint, Actor Baur roars like a lion, whispers like a snake, employs every known trick of the method which more inhibited actors contemptuously describe as "mugging." This is a technique which he acquired before the War when, as one of the villains in the Paris Grand Guignol, he used to appear on the stage in La Peste Rouge, wearing a shroud and dripping blood...
Agent Zherdiev discovered enough material for a season of Grand Guignol. Crazy Governor Semenchuk and his sadistic wife had kept the entire colony in terror through two Arctic winters. Semenchuk indulged in long drunken orgies with a thick-headed sledge driver named Startzev, raped Eskimo girls, sent indignant Dr. Wulfson off on a long sledge expedition, sent Startzev after him to kill him, then tried to poison Startzev. The widow Wulf-son managed to administer a life-saving antidote to Startzev. Mrs. Semenchuk whipped Eskimo men, who were first forbidden to fish, then denied use of the Island...
...writes about the greasepaint dramatics of Broadway or the alcoholic hilarities of fabulous newshawks, at his middling worst he seems a dim shadow of O. Henry or Edgar Allan Poe. Best story in the book (Snowfall in Childhood) stands out like Shirley Temple on the stage of the Grand Guignol: a simply written reminiscence of first love. Some others...
...Room In Red & White (by Roy Hargrave: Dwight Deere Wiman & George Kondolf, producers) is a one-act Grand Guignol melodrama about a family poisoning inflated to three acts. The facts that the play was written by Roy Hargrave (House Party), acted by Chrystal Herne and set as for a durbar by Jo Mielziner, do not prevent A Room In Red & White from becoming tedious. Silliest scene: the one in which a fiendish father (Leslie Adams) manages simultaneously to knock flat both his wife and their grown...