Word: hit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most important and least noticed dispatches of the whole war in China last week hit the back pages of U. S. newspapers. It was merely a pair of sentences to the effect that Chinese troops had lured a Japanese army into perilous passes of the Chungtiao Mountains, at the foot of Shansi Province, rolled down on them from advantageous positions, and in four days slaughtered 2,000 men. Even allowing for exaggeration, this was a major Chinese victory...
Sophisticated New Yorkers, accustomed to the finesse of their annual Skating Club Carnivals, have been slow to warm up to professional, itinerant ice shows. Last week, however, when the Ice Follies of 1940 hit town, New Yorkers crammed Madison Square Garden to the rafters for six nights, whistled and stomped like yokels. For suddenly, it seemed, the variety-show-on-ice had crystallized into first-rate entertainment...
...Shakespeare open season for 1939-40 started last week* when Maurice Evans reopened on Broadway in his last season's hit, an uncut Hamlet. It proved once again a much more tumultuous and exciting play than the usual cut version. Interesting minor change: This season Polonius wears spectacles, a detail which caused a great to-do among anachronism-chasers until they ascertained that glasses were worn in Shakespeare's day. Nobody seemed to care whether they were wtirn in Hamlet...
...tabloid Julius Caesar is a hit; so is a marathon Hamlet. A romantic play-Romeo and Juliet-starring Katharine Cornell, does well enough; a largely rhetorical one-King Richard II-starring a then not well-known Maurice Evans, does far better. Hamlet, with John Gielgud, then no name on Broadway, goes over big; with Leslie Howard, a big Broadway name, flops. Tallulah Bankhead cannot last a week in Antony and Cleopatra, Walter Huston cannot last a month in Othello. The simplest answer is almost certainly right: Shakespeare is as popular as his performance...
Christopher Morley has again hit bestseller lists with "Kitty Foyle," a novel about a young lady in Philadelphia. It's off the beaten track of Morley novels, and therefore all the more welcome . . . Lloyd C. Douglas' "Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal" is another in the manner of "Green Light" and "White Banners." Others will presently be forthcoming, it is to be presumed . . . "Escape," by Ethel Vance, is a sensitive and moving story of he Nazi regime and of its victims . . . "Christmas Holiday" is a worthy addition to the list of books which have made W. Somerset Maugham...