Word: pluckings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...both the novel and its film adaptation have enjoyed a hardy popularity. Like most Victorian novels, Charlotte Bronte's book is a thinly-disguised social criticism with its target religious bigotry and self-righteousness. Miss Bronte was indeed indignant, and once described her novel as an attempt "to pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee." In true Dickens' fashion, she wrote about insufferable aunts, cruel schoolmasters, and orphans' asylums, and made them all as black as the corridors of Thornfield. But she added to her novel a vivid sense of melodrama, replete with thunderstorms, dark castles, and voices...
Smitten with admiration for her pluck and for her thriving little print shop, Harvard President Holyoke married the former Mrs. Glover. His admiration for her business acumen and the monopoly she enjoyed in the trade made him throw the University's printing her way. In addition, her shop printed such books as the bay Pslam Book and the Bible in an Indian dialect...
Still, the new ones are a remarkable echo of the old. Coincidence is used just as recklessly; the old fictional virtues of pluck and luck dominate every page. But Tom Jr. has it all over his proud dad as an inventor. Where the old hero aroused the admiration of his fans by changing the gear ratio to get unheard-of speed out of his motorcycle, his son completes a revolutionary radioactivity detector overnight. In 1910, Tom had his readers chewing their nails when he ascended in a crude dirigible. In 1954's Tom Swift and His Flying...
...with a young Harvard student who apparently was connected with the Harvard football team in an official capacity. My wife and I were sitting in the general admission seats when down the field came the young Harvard student. At each five yard stripe he would reach down, pluck twice apparently at blades of grass, then hold his hand extended up in the air. He would not look up at his extended hand. However, when he brought his hand down he would look at it and jot down with pencil and paper his findings. He did this the entire length...
Scriptwriter Frank Fenton, an old pro of 20 years and about 20 films in Hollywood, has written scenes and characters with the freshness-and some of the clean-limbed naiveté-of a first novelist. His dialogue is always clear and quick, and occasionally it reaches down to pluck some nerve of real human sensibility. Apart from the poem he gave one of the Confederate prisoners to speak ("Faith was ... a jungle/ Where two children trod/ Looking for violets/ Angleworms and God"), the bravos for Bravo should go largely...