Word: populars
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Composer George Frederic Handel gave the first performance of his Messiah, most popular oratorio of all time. The present opera house dates from...
...standing up. Lacking Fairbanks' punch and ken. he has Robin's form and flair down pat. If prankish Actor Fairbanks was a man's Robin Hood, handsome, romantic Actor Flynn performs for everybody else. A head-thumping, sword-swishing, bow-twanging technicolor attempt to foreshorten the popular episodes of the Soo-year-old saga into the perspective of a single connected story. Robin Hood 1938 makes the last of Richard I's crusading years its period, draws a bead on Regent Prince John's tax oppression that should bring a nod from every liberty-loving...
...analysis of the works of Zane Grey in The Saturday Review of Literature. At that time the prolific Western-story writer had turned out 33 books, with a total sale of about 10,000,000 copies. After thoughtfully picking them to little bits, Professor Whipple concluded that their enormous popularity did not constitute a serious reflection on U. S. taste. Zane Grey's tireless riders of the purple sage, lone star rangers and wanderers of the wasteland, he decided, were interesting for a curious reason: They were like the heroes of some folk tale that had never quite...
Last week Zane Grey published his 59th book. His total sales now reach about 13,000,000, and his most popular novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, adds up through its many reprintings to 750,000. As in most Zane Grey stories, much of the action in Raiders of Spanish Peaks depends on somebody overhearing somebody else-apparently in the old West there was an eavesdropper crouching behind every clump of sage brush. Also like most Zane Grey stories, the newest one begins with a bang. Hiding out after killing a man, tall, grey-eyed Laramie Nelson observes some gunmen...
Laramie restrains his itching trigger finger until all the cattle on the ranch have been stolen and a madcap Lindsay girl abducted. Then the slaughter is terrific. Partly confirming Professor Whippie's thesis are strange philosophical asides that interrupt the gun play and suggest that even popular romancers are sometimes troubled by the moral of their tales. Staring at the dangling body of a rustler he has just lynched, Laramie reflects: "It [lynching] was a common practice, inaugurated ... in order to intimidate cowpunchers going wrong. Not greatly had it succeeded...