Word: headlong
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That droning--an airplane? Japs? Germans? Reds? It swells and fades, angry, important, businesslike. Ah, a wasp, or is it a hornet, zooms gracefully through the window and roars headlong into the closet. Sudden silence. Probably sampling the various gravy and beer spots on the Vagabond's suit. That'll hold him for a while--maybe kill him. The Vagabond relaxes: let's see, history review today. Damn, action again. The wasp-hornet breezes out of the closet, squats on the bowl of a pipe, sharpens up his stinger with his hind legs, hums contentedly to himself...
...Headlong as a paper chase, Schoolhouse on the Lot is just as full of false scents and wasted motion. Playwrights Fields & Chodorov have used about 33 of the famed 36 original plots, scrambled them into doodlebug farce, peppered them with gags. Underneath the roughhousing is a healthy contempt for the method in Hollywood's madness, a keen eye for skulduggery. But compared with a Once in a Lifetime or a Boy Meets Girl, Schoolhouse on the Lot is too loud, too loopy, too larruping...
...with all its headlong violence, Boundary Against Night follows a clear pattern, contains a dozen long narrative passages that stand out like detached stories. Its characters are stylized social types rather than conventional realistic portraits: Ben Coventry, blinded during the War, generous, humane, intelligent, helpless, is a symbol of sightless aristocracy that cannot provide social leadership. John Hargedon, the hard-pressed, woman-chasing policeman, is a symbol of leaderless strength and courage that wastes itself. Ben Coventry lives in seclusion in his Beacon Street house, breaks with his class when the amorous wife of an old friend guides...
...Some 100,000 Chinese troops deployed under orders to defend Hangchow, 100 miles southwest of Shanghai, scattered in headlong flight last week and that great city fell to the Japanese-the sixth Chinese provincial capital taken since the present war began last July...
...Imagist or Metaphysical poets, who seem to borrow from Music, Psychology, Painting and Mathematical Physics their respective poetic first principles, these poets seem to borrow theirs from the demotic art of Architecture. Most dazzling of the lot, yet slyest, is W. H. Auden; sincerest and slickest, Stephen Spender; most headlong, most jerry-built, C. Day Lewis; most prosy and homeliest, Louis MacNeice...