Word: scoundrel
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Plays and best-sellers of recent months have restored the integrated scoundrel to literary popularity. We don't think the Scarlett O'Haras and Sammy Glicks are sound characters from the standpoint of credibility; nor do we agree they are sufficiently rounded to be hailed the modern counterparts of Lady Macbeth. We do admit they make entertaining movie-copy, and--it may be added--plenty of it. In the same vogue are "The Little Foxes," three thorough-going heels now transposed to the screen for one price of admission...
...playing-at a safe distance yourself, maybe, with fire. In spreading Shelley you are indirectly helping to stir up the great socialist question . . . the one question which bids fair to swamp you all. . . ." Thomas Carlyle rudely cut short one Shelleyite rhapsody. "Yon man Shelley," he growled, "was just a scoundrel, and ought to have been hanged...
...draws as a screen writer (some $6,000 weekly) balding Ben Hecht spends many of his expensive words on acid comments about Hollywood moviemakers. Possibly as protest, he and his sidekick, Playwright Charles MacArthur, took four flings at independent movie production, scored one bull's-eye with The Scoundrel, eventually quit. This year, Columbia gave Hecht $260,000 worth of Hollywood backing with which he wrote, produced, directed Angels Over Broadway, another of his preoccupations with the regeneration of moral strays who have felt the cooling shadow of death. The three strays are a tippling, has-been playwright (Thomas...
...23rd in a class of 33, he considered himself a military genius. At West Point too began his bitter feud with Joseph E. Johnston. Cause: a tavern keeper's daughter. Elected to the Presidency by accident (delegates preferred Toombs), he was bitterly assailed by his own colleagues. ("That scoundrel Jeff Davis," said Toombs.) A bad guesser, he made his worst guess when he tried to force English recognition by withholding cotton shipments. That notion cost the Confederacy a billion dollars, wrecked its finances...
Last week came a play of Pagan's own and with it the clue to how he wangled his cash. Pagan's To the End of Time proved to be a lashing attack on John L. Lewis. Called John Steele in the play and portrayed as a scoundrel, he dies in Act II, goes to Heaven only long enough to be lambasted, then is booted...