Word: prurient
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Vardis Fisher's latest volume, the sixth in his ficto-stenographic history of civilization, is less a novel than a pedantic, prurient diatribe against one of the best-publicized kings Israel ever had. Solomon (loth Century B.C.) is presented as a sort of Old Testament Sammy Click with chin whiskers, a tough little opportunist who elbows his way into the big money, marries a glamour girl (Khate, an Egyptian princess), and hires a frustrated poet to ghost his copy-even, it would seem, such copy as the Book of Proverbs...
...painted the Post's face as gaudily as he knew how, lowered the newspaper's neckline and its tone. Day after day, Page One gave prurient readers the eye: SIN STREET (prostitutes), ONE WOMAN'S ORDEAL (abortions), LOVE ALONG THE PARTY LINE (a girl Communist's "intimate" confessions), GREENWICH VILLAGE AT NIGHT (Bohemianism and homosexuality), TEN NIGHTS IN A DANCE' HALL ("By Henriette de Sieyes, Vassar '45") and THE SEX CRIMINAL. These tactics paid off. By last March the Post was selling 389,454 copies a day and was solidly in the black. Last...
Willingham's first novel, End as a Man, published in 1947 when he was only 24, was a keyhole report on life in a Southern military college; righteously indignant in one breath and droolingly prurient the next, it read like the notes of a small-town peeper on the broom closet of hell. Some critics went part way with Farrell's estimate of Willingham, but others rebuked the book as a discharge of childish hostility by a very young man. But when the book was twice taken to court for obscenity (and twice acquitted), readers caught the scent...
Stromboli (RKO Radio). Any film by Director Roberto Rossellini and Actress Ingrid Bergman would seem anti-climactic after their own stormy, thoroughly publicized private lives. As an anticlimax in moviemaking, this one can stand on its own feet. A bleak, draggy little picture, it fulfills neither RKO's prurient advertising claims, nor Rossellini's obviously artistic intentions...
...Cold Outside. It was all about a girl who kept protesting that she had to go home and a boy who kept insisting that she stay. Outside, he warned, the snow was knee-deep. Queasy NBC first banned the lyrics as too racy, then decided they contained nothing provably prurient, and put the tune on the air. Baby hit the hit parade and began climbing...