Word: poorly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...intended to be a superheated spellbinder. But though it boils, toils and goes to no end of trouble, it produces far more spectacles than spells. Spectacle No. i is a fair example. In the midst of a gloomy, Golgotha-like landscape, cluttered with ruffians and sinister twisted trees, a poor gypsy lad is about to be blinded with hot irons. Suddenly a portentous cruciform light appears around the torture stake, and aided by a swarm of brother gypsies, the boy escapes. Later, he grows up to be the fabulous Count Cagliostro (Orson Welles), intimate of princes and instrument of weird...
...wasn't impressed by such accounts, but his mother, the Dame de Littlehampton, wouldn't let him forget them; she was the kind of lady who expected her only son to make his mark on the armor and the life expectancy of his foes. When she hustled poor, terrified Willie off to join King Richard's crusade in the Holy Land, militant Christianity enlisted its feeblest champion...
...years a devoted New Deal bureaucrat, felt "as if this death were a sword that he must take to his bosom, slowly, inch by inch." John's neglected wife Ellen suffered no such heroic tortures. A rich woman who had married John when he was a poor college instructor, she called Roosevelt "That Man." Her grief was of another kind. The Gregorys' son Timmy had been killed in the war and for that tragedy she split the blame between the President and her husband, who had refused to use his influence to keep Timmy out of the draft...
...regicide conspiracy? Poor little Wheeler was grilled at length to discover if it was. Rumors spread that he was really a dwarf, or a scout for a gang of thieves, or "a Certain Gentleman's idiot bastard that had been shut up in the Devil's Tower since birth and had escaped after braining his keeper...
...took Disraeli to put an end to the nonsense. In a brilliant speech in the House of Commons, he exonerated Wheeler, elevated him to the rank of a momentary national hero, and incidentally maneuvered Gladstone into looking like a blackhearted oppressor of the poor. Disraeli, it appears, shared Novelist Bonnet's notion that Wheeler was chiefly a pretty good little symbol of the 1876 "lower classes"-grimy but devoted to the Queen...