Word: horror
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...shots, has produced such classics as Everyman, Twelfth Night, Dr. Faustus; such a novelty as W. S. Gilbert's Tom Cobb, or Fortune's Toy; such modern plays as Biography, High Tor, The Petrified Forest. Last week it tackled John Webster's difficult Elizabethan horror play, The Duchess of Malfi, proved itself braver than Broadway, which last produced the play in 1858. (Two seasons ago Orson Welles planned to do it, got cold feet...
Pennsylvania's Eastern State Penitentiary is old enough to be remembered with horror by Dickens in his American Notes (1842). It was known then, as now, as the Cherry Hill prison. One night last week, over Philadelphia's KYW, the inmates of 110-year-old Cherry Hill staged their Christmas musicale. Sixteen pent-up voices serenaded The Little Man Who Wasn't There; assorted whistlers, fiddlers, ladybug plunkers whanged away at heart strings beyond the walls. But the tune that dampened the eyes of Warden Herbert ("Cap") Smith and beefy Deputy Tom Meikrantz was a Chinese prisoner...
...Vatican City the Papal newsorgan Osservatore Romano reflected the horror of His Holiness: "This ferocious Ivan sits in the Kremlin in a worker's smock and after the heads of both enemies and friends have rolled, issues appeals to war to the people, regiments the wretched moujik in the Red Army, and transforms it into a blind instrument of oppression of the liberty of nations...
Tower of London (Universal) solves the problem of what to do next with a popular monster (Boris Karloff), who has already been deranged (The Lost Patrol), mummified (The Mummy), roasted alive (Frankenstein), resurrected (The Son of Frankenstein). Horror-man Karloff is now introduced to one of Hollywood's most accomplished villains (Basil Rathbone) in the cellars of the Tower of London circa 1480. There, amidst moaning victims, clanking chains and chopping blocks, Villain Rathbone (the crookbacked Richard, Duke of Gloucester) shows Monster Karloff (Mord, the club-footed constable of the Tower) how to satisfy an active homicidal mania...
Playwrights from Shakespeare down have been tempted to dramatize King Richard III and the events of his bloody reign. Hollywood has finally succumbed; but with typical Hollywood erudition, emphasis has been shifted from the character of the kind to the horror of his crimes, and the result is a gruesome nightmare of sudden death with but few elements of constructive drama. Basil Rathbone, as the king, happily avoids overacting and creates a reasonably credible character; but the script and the direction are against him. That amiable Englishman, Boris Karloff, is made the center of interest, and the results...