Word: middlebrows
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...yearning for cultural respectability paid off, particularly after pictures began to talk. Street Scene, Arrowsmith, Dead End, Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes were expensively produced, soberly realized borrowings, often from the second drawer of other arts. They formed the basis for his bankable reputation at a time when the middlebrow public tended to administer a literacy test before taking a movie seriously. By persuading audiences and critics to regard at least some films as an art form, Goldwyn did his industry an enormous service...
...such breathtaking speed have a refreshingly foreign perspective that often cuts through the confusions to the core of the complicated affair. Their judgments are hard, yet not unexpected. Richard Nixon, they write, is a "not very brainy President." He surrounded himself with "an elite of mean-minded, middlebrow conformists; men who were simply not up to the job of government...
...candid about it, in these great times who needs another great debt? For the wisdom of men like Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hegel tends to be preserved in sedimentary chapters of books more likely to be found in the attic than on the coffee table. Lives there a middlebrow who does not resent the great philosophers...
...even the pumpkin on Wyeth's fence post, if pumpkins could vote, would have voted for Ike. "Wyeth country"-the Pennsylvania farm land around Chadds Ford, where he spends the winter, and the summer acreage in Maine-has become landscape as myth or monument by now, the American middlebrow's equivalent of Cezanne's Mont-Ste.-Victoire or Monet's lily ponds at Giverny...
Writer Greenburg is a good-natured humorist whose essays and novels (How to Be a Jewish Mother, Scoring) have demonstrated a shrewd and compassionate eye for the frets and frustrations of middlebrow, middle-class urban America. His first film script is a similarly gentle, knowing throwaway. Director McCarty is careful to make no big deal of it, and his quartet of players is attractively fumble-thumbed in their efforts to have their decorum and shed it too. I Could Never may be the least important - certainly the least pretentious - movie of the year. But it is far from the least...