Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Lake County (Fla.) school board added a sordid postscript to the saga of the Platt children (of Irish-Indian descent), who were barred from school in Mt. Dora because Sheriff Willis McCall arbitrarily decided that they are Negroes (TIME, Dec. 13, 1954 et seq.). By unanimous vote, the board fired Math Teacher Don Conway for giving his blessings to a high-school student petition urging that the Platt children be allowed to stay. Conway's only comment: "If giving the kids my moral support in what I consider a Christian act is guilt, then I guess...
...verdict but because Judge Francis L. Valente, trying to avoid press exploitation of the gamy details, had barred reporters and the public from the trial. The new trial was wide open. Once more Judge Valente was on the bench, and Call Girl Pat Ward, only 21, retold her sordid idyl of life with Mickey...
...whole sordid episode should focus the public attention on the integrity and morality of those agencies presently in existence for the purpose of safeguarding the nation's security. "The FBI has known for years that Matusow was a squalid liar" says TIME . . . Our entire security program and the morality of the men who administer it, and the philosophy behind it, should be subjected to painstaking investigation and reappraisal. J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Brownell should welcome such an examination...
...loved to posture and pose in his outlandish Arab regalia and often embroidered the truth. "Finding they wouldn't believe it," Lawrence himself once wrote a friend, "I told them lies." The ire of Aldington's critics was directed far less at the existence of sordid facts concerning their hero than at the brutal and relentless way Aldington sought to reduce Lawrence's reputation to nothingness. "It is as if someone were to describe Shakespeare's atrocious table manners at the Mermaid tavern, while omitting to mention that he also wrote plays," said Historian Harold Nicolson...
...Gorki's sordid portrayal of life in a tenement basement is heavy with platitudes and cumbersome dialogue, and during the central part of the film when the adaptation follows the play most closely, interest falls to a dangerous low. Only by some humorous scenes added at the beginning of the picture, by good camera work in the beer-garden scene, and by the killing of the landlord towards the end, does Renoir rescue his material from itself...