Word: slickness
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...director, Homer Saint-Gaudens, recalls that the public "used to spit at 50 yards at a modern painting. Now they say, 'I don't know anything about it-it may be all right.' " Painter Blume had spent three long years candy-coating his enigmatic Rock with slick, Technicolored gloss, and the public seemed to like the taste...
John Steinbeck fared even worse, but made less fuss about his failure. His novelette, Burning Bright (produced also as a play that flopped), was a slick but transparently thin plea for universal love. Robert Penn Warren went back to his native Kentucky for a frontier novel of violence and tortured emotions, World Enough and Time. It had power and murkiness in about equal proportions...
Cardinals & Crackups. The year's most popular book, fiction or nonfiction, was a fat, slick novel about a young priest's spectacular rise in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Commonplace, often dull, Henry Morton Robinson's The Cardinal nevertheless found nearly 600,000 customers, of whom about three-fourths chose the paper-covered edition...
Overhaul. The Government changed the company's name to American President Lines, Ltd., ran the line as a U.S.-supervised private corporation, and pulled it off the rocks within a year. After pouring in $4,500,000 to slick up the ships, the Government cashed in on the wartime shipping boom. By 1943 the line was able to pay off both the new financing and the $7,500,000 Dollar Line debt, most of it, says American President, out of earnings...
Kirk Douglas is competent as the "gentleman caller" but is outclassed by Miss Lawrence, Miss Wyman, and Mr. Kennedy and, whereas in the play the caller was a doltish sort of a fellow putting on an act, he emerges as a bright, slick young man in the screen version. Somehow the original caller was more consistent with Williams' description of the entire work "a picture of a fundamentally enslaved section of American society. . . living in huge buildings always burning with the slow implacable fires of human desperation...