Word: monumental
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Internal Combustion. He was all sorts of things in the next three years-a foundry worker, a monument polisher (he carved his father's tombstone), a brewery hand, a railroad roustabout. But in 1905 he got a job in a garage, and fell in love forever with the internal-combustion engine...
Chaplin's use of the sound track is sparing but excellent. His own brilliant musical score has the double virtue of being perfectly appropriate and independently memorable. In his opening scenes, showing civic stuffed shirts unveiling a monument, the speeches come through as squeaky noises that are at once a spoof of the speakers' pomposity and a nose-thumbing Chaplin commentary on the ya-ta-ta of the early talkies. He uses sound again when he swallows a whistle and his squealing hiccups bring dogs and taxicabs...
...China as a Red Cross director in 1940, and was captured by the Japanese during World War II. After inheriting Mary's long-hoarded money, he said he hoped with it "in some small way" to help improve U.S. foreign relations. He also resolved to erect a monument on the grave of the recluse's mother. Unforgiving Mary Bullock Powers had left it unmarked for 37 years...
...popular; many of his fellow citizens grudgingly envy him his wealth and audacity. As many more deprecate him, and point out, correctly, that he is hardly typical of the Texas millionaire (see box). Nevertheless, Glenn McCarthy is as peculiarly a product of Texas as the famed San Jacinto monument; the Lone Star State is one of the few places left in the world where millionaires hatch seasonally, like May flies...
...carries the unseen hero through papal and princely intrigues, the bloody uprising of Savonarola, the siege of Florence and the sack of Rome. Out of the turbulence of the age and the passionate rigors of Michelangelo's genius flowers the beauty of his masterworks: the David, the Medici monument, the Moses, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Last Judgment, the soaring dome of St. Peter...