Word: sociale
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...cafe society saw the nearest thing yet to a man biting a dog. Pretender Extraordinary Mike Romanoff, of Vilna, Russia, and/or Hillsboro, Ill., after some 20 years on cafe society's cuff, threw a party. The formal invitation, engraved with a big Imperial R, read: "To discharge his social obligations past and future, we have received commands from his Imperial Highness, Prince Michael Romanoff, to invite ( ) to a buffet supper on Saturday evening, June the tenth, at the Clover Club."; and continuing: "Guests will please bring their own liquor and fee the servants...
Invitation to Happiness (Paramount). Prize fighters are not numerous, but the recurrent movies about the marital problems of prize fighters who marry above them have attained national significance. Most piquant of the recent lot, Invitation to Happiness bridges the social gap in a one-reel leap, thenceforth takes up where most palooka-heiress movies leave off, to see what may happen to such an alliance in, say, ten years...
Next two days, the writer-delegates got together in closed meetings at the New School for Social Research. A critics' group argued the merits of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (verdict: an exciting novel with a weak last half). A verse group was entertained by Dorothy Parker with a speech called Sophisticated Verse, and the hell with it. A fiction group heard a dozen speeches, ranging from talks on how to worm social-conscious fiction into pulp magazines to Dashiell Hammett's warning that Hollywood techniques are poison to novelists...
Author Kyra Goritzina and her husband, Sergei, are White emigres from Russia, where they "lost nearly all that is dear to anyone-country, home, family, wealth and social standing." Soon as they arrived in the U. S., in 1923, Sergei was offered a $250-a-week job as an actor, in Mowris Gest's pantomime, The Miracle. But he quit during rehearsals. To him and his wife the play was "sheer blasphemy," its point appalling and incomprehensible. They found it hard to believe that "the Mother of God would deceive people just to protect the sins...
Author West starts off well, with wit, a nimble imagination, shrewd slants on the social roots of Hollywood's crackpottery. But well before the last scene-a world première which turns into a savage riot-his intended tragedy turns into screwball grotesque, and groggy Author West can Barely distinguish fantastic shadows from fantastic substance. At a similar stage of Tying to get Hollywood on paper, William Saroyan before him merely folded his arms, admitted with rare humility that Hollywood had given him "the smiling heart of an idiot and the good nature of a high-class phony...