Word: sordid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...with the Golden Arm, Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren's compassionate understanding of Frankie and his world is the foundation of one of the finest novels so far this year. Readers with queasy stomachs may shrink from an environment in which the unbelievably sordid has become a way of life. They will also come away with some of Algren's own tender concern for his wretched, confused and hopelessly degenerate cast of characters. In that, Writer Algren scores a true novelist's triumph...
...After a sordid divorce from Baron Wrangel, Siri married Strindberg. He wrote furiously-learned history (Sweden's Relations to China and the Tartar Lands), a religious play (The Secret of the Guild), a novel (The Red Room) for which he was denounced as an atheist and a radical. In 1884 he briefly became a popular hero when he was brought to trial (and acquitted) for committing blasphemy in print. He once called Christianity a religion for "women, eunuchs, children and savages." When his four-year-old son asked him whether God could see in the dark, Strindberg answered...
...seduction of Bobby-Soxer Sally Kelton (Sally Forrest) is neither brutal nor particularly sordid. It is simply commonplace. By the time Sally knows that she is pregnant, her seducer has disappeared and she is already half in love with an upstanding young gas-station manager (Keefe Brasselle). From there on the plot follows all the steps of Sally's degradation and eventual rehabilitation with a kind of remorseless documentary fervor...
...defend Nick "Pretty Boy" Romano (John Derek), a young hoodlum charged with killing a cop. Bogart has known "Pretty Boy" for years, mistakenly believes him innocent, and blames society for the boy's criminal ways. To prove his point to the jury, he tells, in flashbacks, the sordid story of Romano's life. In the telling, Veteran Bogart inevitably displaces young Newcomer Derek as the real center of interest...
...golden boys" who wander through lanes "canopied by the sly innocence of the woodbine's dangling stems," while adoring lasses stroke "the faded, maybe bloodstained, cloth" of heir uniforms with "shy, white fingers." He dreams of poets who move through life like gods, never erring, never sinking into sordid realms of spite and pettiness...