Word: roomer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life of a shabby-ungenteel rooming house in a Southern town. The characters included a landlady with a past and a thirst (Jessie Royce Landis); her daughter, a boxer's wife and almost anybody's woman; her adopted daughter, a rather noisily religious girl; her chief roomer, a Magnolia Streetwalker; and enough men to illustrate the women's ways. Done right, it might have been enjoyably raffish. Since Playwright Batson's script was as tasteless and untidy as his people's lives, it was just unpleasantly dull...
...clearly above the rest of the voices in the congregation. Afterwards he rode back to his mother's comfortable, old-fashioned house on Oliver Street and ate a turkey dinner. Neighbors and newsmen stood outside scuffing around in the "fallen leaves. Mrs. George Dewey's elderly roomer, Ed Stanard, a retired mail carrier, modestly kept out of sight, getting his meals elsewhere...
Mama (Irene Dunne), who is very much the boss in her home, carefully allocates her husband's weekly pay. Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes), who wants to grow up to be a writer, listens enraptured while the family's roomer, a worn-out old actor (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), reads aloud from Dickens and Shakespeare. Mama's painfully timid old-maid sister (Ellen Corby), who wants to marry an equally timid undertaker (Edgar Bergen), seeks Mama's moral support. Little Dagmar is operated on for mastoiditis (by Dr. Rudy Vallee, with a beard...
...they talked a while on the porch. When she said goodnight and stepped inside the door of her rooming house, her landlord told her to move out. To Landlord Arthur Rupe's way of thinking, he had good reason: Iris' escort was a Negro. A fellow roomer took Iris' side, and Rupe ordered her out, too. "A private home," said he, "is no place for inter-mixing races...
...Oberammergau, where Bavarian peasants performed their world-famed Passion Play. Schoenberner discovered that the peasant who played the role of Christ was thereby enabled to charge tourists twice as much rent for his rooms as any of his followers (Judas, it was whispered, couldn't find a roomer at any price; and St. John, who was the handsomest of the Apostles, finally eloped to the U.S. with a rich American widow). The second lesson in perspective came through World War I, in which Private Schoenberner, who had hitherto been crazy about horses, was given the job of grooming them...