Word: minor
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Columbia Records, there was much less hoopla. Their new Manhattan recording studio, a converted church, was as sparsely peopled as an English cathedral at evensong. A hundred-odd lights, suspended like enormous inverted flowers from the beamed ceiling, illuminated a small group of bored musicians, engineers and minor officials. A poker game was started, and Arthur Godfrey, who had been called in to cut some corn named I'm Going Back to Whur I Come From, "noodled," as he called it, on the studio organ. When word came that the ban was over, Columbia, undistracted by bigwigs and publicity...
...fighting in it. But as a novelist, he cannot bring to life the feelings of men in war with the same vividness that he brings a battle to life. Towards his sad weakling of a hero, whom Wolfert tiresomely philosophizes over, the reader can feel only the sort of minor pity one feels for a sick puppy...
...picture follows Virginia's progress through the various wards, divided into descending degrees of misery, like the circles of hell. Throughout, it preserves the novel's sharply observed minor touches of asylum life-the nurses' way of speaking in front of inmates as if they weren't there (as some adults speak in front of children); the strange snobbery of the sick who look down on their sicker fellows; the large-looming small idiocies of institutional bureaucracy, such as the clean carpet in one ward which must not be stepped on (and the wonderful old woman...
...tries to get across the point that schizophrenia is something that "can happen to anybody." And Virginia's cure, once she turns the corner, seems suspiciously quick, easy and well-timed for a happy ending (in reality, she might very likely suffer a relapse). But with all its minor faults, The Snake Pit is an important motion picture. One of its notable achievements is that it establishes Olivia de Havilland not so much as a star, a dubious title she already held, but as an actress...
...Cold contained some good war poetry. (It was a year in which America became Sitwell conscious, and the touring Sitwells discovered America. Osbert Sitwell sketched an acid portrait of his delightfully eccentric father in Laughter in the Next Room; Sacheverell, youngest of the literary family, celebrated the minor arts of peace in The Hunters and the Hunted...