Word: rakings
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...Notorious Gentleman (J. Arthur Rank-Universal) is a British-made comedy which English moviegoers chuckled over last year when it was called The Rake's Progress. U.S. distributors have changed the title, on the theory that Americans might mistake the picture for a documentary on gardening (TIME, Aug. 5). U.S. censors demanded further appeasement. (Example: as an undergraduate cutup, the rake, or notorious gentleman, one day climbs an Oxford monument to deposit a chamber pot on the spire.* The Johnston Office, either on the grounds that a thundermug was an affront to American plumberhood or that it was just...
...whatever name it's labeled, the picture is pretty funny. The rake (Rex Harrison) is an amiable, Noel Cowardish sort of cad whose inability to take anything very seriously causes no end of trouble to himself, his employers, his family, his chums and his ladyfriends. As played by Actor Harrison and manipulated by writers-directors-producers Frank Launder and Sydney Gilliat (one of Mr. Rank's brighter young production teams), the rake's fast, downhill progress is topnotch fun with a pleasant British accent. The fun holds up, and so does the picture, until all the actors...
...Notorious Gentleman, starring Rex Harrison, was released in England as The Rake's Progress; U.S. distributors changed the title so that American moviegoers would not mistake it for a documentary on gardening. The picture's chief moral lapse: it makes adultery look like too much fun. At the end of all his wenching, the Rake dies as he has lived-happy and unrepentant. Death is just what he deserves, but the Johnston Office wants him to show some remorse...
...Private property must be used for the benefit of the nation. The private owner can have his rake-off so long as the rake-off is not too expensive, but this attitude on the part of private enterprise that the Government must not come in and must leave it to private enterprise, is just plain nonsense and bunkum...
Britannia's Progress. Said Hogarth: "My picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show." His two greatest "dumb shows," Harlot's Progress and Rake's Progress, sold like fish & chips but, in an age when only portraits or "historical" paintings in the grand manner were considered Art, the connoisseurs ignored them. And because the characters were real enough to recognize, no one thought of comparing either series of engravings with Bunyan's great book...