Word: orphan
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Sheeler was a philosophical sort. He had grown up in an orphan asylum, had become a depression road-kid, and-before he found a job-a petty criminal. He served his time quietly, although his wife had obtained records which proved he had been at work in New York on the night the policeman was shot in Philadelphia. But after seven years, when the cops failed to keep what he regarded as a solemn promise-to get him out after a short term-he began to fight...
...Ronald Neame, the British team responsible for 1947's superb Great Expectations, the movie recreates the novel's pungent brew of harshly realistic detail, extravagant melodrama, sordid depravity and sentimental warmth. Between the dreary, bare-brick expanse of the parish workhouse where Oliver begins life as an orphan and the elegant Brownlow mansion where he finally takes his rightful place, the settings and costumes summon up all but the smells of Britain's lower depths in the early 1800s: "the cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London; the foul and frowsy dens, where vice is closely packed...
...Theosophy (a watered-down Western copy of Hinduism) while reviewing a book by its founder, Mme. Blavatsky, went to India where she dressed in the native sari, became the leader of the world wide Theosophist movement (present member ship: 150,000). In 1909 she adopted a twelveyear- old Indian orphan boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she declared to be a reincarnation of Christ. Today, having renounced his divinity, he is an itinerant lecturer on mystic subjects, some times known as "the messiah in plus fours." In 1929 Mrs. Besant tried to start a Theosophist colony at her Happy Valley ranch...
Only those with money get food. The shopkeepers show stony-faced callousness for the blind beggar boy, the orphan girl haltingly thrusting an empty G.I. ration can toward the grain baskets...
Sixpence a Week. Ernie (not even at Whitehall would anyone have thought of calling him Ernest) had once been a drayman's boy himself, and a shop clerk and a pageboy and a tram conductor into the bargain. An orphan at six, he had gone to work at ten as a farmhand for sixpence a week, and promptly struck for higher wages. The strike failed. Ernie was fired. Soon afterward he got another job at a shilling a week, plus a bonus of jam on Sunday for reading to his new boss out of Hansard's parliamentary reports...