Word: hard
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...none of the sophisticated humor with which, in such superbly organized spy thrillers as The Lady Vanishes, The Man Who Knew Too Much, smart British Director-Producer Alfred Hitchcock makes improbable situations plausible. Espionage Agent is filled with as many improbabilities as spies, and it is almost as hard to avoid spotting them...
...well bossing a Fifth Avenue department store as British Cinemactress Carroll is doing in U. S. pictures. Gail knew all the answers and none of them was masculine. But when cocksure Bill Burnett (self-consciously cute Fred MacMurray) blew in from Bali like a tropical monsoon, scripters were hard put to it to keep him from thawing icy Gail too fast, convincing her too soon that woman's place is in the home when not in the maternity ward. Vainly trying to stave off this inevitable ending, they tossed in trim Noel Van Ness (Danish-born Cinemactress Osa Massen...
...habitually refers to himself in the third person. His entrance into a Harlem hotspot is nothing short of imperial. "The Lion is here," is his simple greeting, and it gets plenty of respectful attention. For Willie may not be the greatest piano player on earth, but he is hard to beat between 110th Street and the Yankee Stadium...
Mark Van Doren* has done this job and maybe more. His qualifications would be hard to better. As a critic, Van Doren began his career in 1916 with a study of Thoreau, followed by an acute book on Dryden in 1920. An instructor at Columbia, he collaborated with his brother Carl on a textbook in 1925 (American & British Literature Since 1890). A poet of steadily finer weave and frosty skill, he published his Collected Poems this year. From 1935 to 1938 he studied cinema as The Nation's movie critic. And for the last ten years he has taught...
...sound in their lives the clear depths of human grace." In Henry IV, however, Van Doren considers that Shakespeare came to mastery by discovering that poetry can be better than beautiful; Hotspur, who hates poetry, is a fine poet "out of a hot love far nothing except reality and hard sense...