Word: legend
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Jesse James's posthumous pressagents; the ballad singers, have molded him to heroic proportions. So have most of his biographers. Lacking anything sounder than a dubious mixture of octogenarians gossip and Missouri legend on which to base their judgments, they have served up a dauntless, do-gooding 19th Century Robin Hood who carried the honor of the Old South in one hand and a parcel for the poor in the other. Few in the ballad audience wanted it otherwise. If the storybook Jesse was short on flesh and blood, at least he satisfied a secret, belly-warming...
This paradox confronts the recent arrival, Dona Ana, who, as legend has it, retained her virtue at the expense of her father who was killed by Juan in a duel over the attempted seduction. Don Juan, a veteran in Hell, is seen to have profited by his earthly satiation with the life of the senses, and he is prepared to visit Heaven to achieve self-fulfilment. In analysis, it may be hard to see how this idea could ever be interesting in dramatic form. But the sparkling prose of the philosophic discussions is delightful for its wit, its audacity...
...Jack the Ripper worked on a smaller scales. There is also scarcely a man alive who believes any of it without something in the way of proof. With that as background, here is the story of the great trained moose of Shawinigan Falls, a noted boast of balled and legend, and an animal which so far as we can judge, actually existed...
Ichabod and Mr. Toad (Disney; RKO Radio) is an uneven doubleheader by Walt Disney, who has combined into one film two dissimilar literary classics: Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. The contrast in the handling of the two unrelated stories neatly illustrates some of Disney's outstanding vices & virtues...
After Basil Rathbone's neatly trimmed and waxed voice, Bing Crosby's narration of Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a letdown. The suspicion that Bing isn't taking the tale seriously is disquieting. The doings of schoolmaster Ichabod Crane are tailored to fit Crosby rather than Irving; that is probably why much of the charm of the first episode is missing in this one. There is enough left over to make good entertainment, though...