Word: pseudo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Miss Dietrich, at her best, is a past mistress of sardonic comedy and of low-life glamor, and if this picture really handled what it pretends to, she could probably have done herself proud; instead, she is required to sing such pseudo-bitter cabaret ersatz as Black Market. Miss Arthur used to have a nice knack for comedy; now & then it still clicks, but she leans more & more lazily on her famous woolly drawl and is forced, in this picture, into an embarrassing passage of whimsy involving a flustered retreat (from amorous John Lund) among filing cabinets, and a panicky...
With such unpleasant people to pillory, and New York's pseudo-society and phony-intellectual scene to prowl about in, a sharp satirist should be able to get in some telling licks. But Van Gelder simply hasn't the satirist's spark, nor even a malicious ear for dialogue, without which good satire is impossible...
...once played a memorable Hamlet, in modern dress) as the corrupt, tormented usurper; or of Norman Wooland as a gentle, modest, steadfast and wise Horatio. Stanley Holloway, as the Gravedigger, is blessedly out-of-tradition;* he seemed to have learned his lines from the earth itself, not from "Shakespearean" pseudo-rustics. Terence Morgan, as Laertes, is the quintessence of an old aristocrat's fine, somewhat spoiled son. For once, Queen Gertrude is young enough, and beautiful enough, to explain all the excitement she generates in the Ghost, his murderer and her son. Indeed, Eileen Herlie, who is only...
...Castillo's almost continuous state of siege Argentines have exchanged a pseudo-legal and semi-respectable repression that is, if anything, more severe. University students and professors with political ideas are no longer pushed around by police; all troublesome ones have been removed, and a new law permits political opinion and activity-so long as it is in favor of the regime. Newspapers which thundered against Castillo's decrees have with but one exception been silenced by Perón's subsidies and newsprint restrictions ; and even great La Prensa is visibly weakening. Recently the government decreed...
...usual, DeMille twists history until Clio cries uncle. The Third Crusade was a chiefly political adventure which set one-half of the world against the other; under DeMille's pseudo-Homeric touch the story shapes up as a sort of Puppetoon Iliad, chiefly concerned with regal wrangles over a medieval beauty (Miss Young...