Word: spit
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Fort Apache (Argosy; RKO Radio), John Ford's first movie since his apostolically solemn Fugitive, is an unabashed potboiler. An idiotically reckless martinet (nicely played by Henry Fonda) tries to impose spit & polish on a begallused garrison in the Far West. After leading a suicidal charge against the local Indians, he is posthumously adored as a hero-except by the men (John Wayne, et al.) who had to carry out his orders. His daughter, a stock Pert Chit by the name of Philadelphia Thursday (Shirley Temple), meanwhile romances with a young officer (played, in appropriate magazine-illustration style...
...high standard you have led people to expect. ... I profoundly agree with the thesis of the writer that there was something more human and greater than "mysticism" in Gandhi. But the "notably unmystical metaphor" which you attribute to him-"If we Indians could only spit in unison, we would form a puddle big enough to drown 300,000 Englishmen"-was never uttered...
There it sat, an $18 million imitation English village, spang in the midst of the Connecticut countryside. An eccentric old woman had built Avon Old Farms as the spit & image of a Cotswold village, with carefully warped roofs, rippled window panes, synthetically worn stairs. She had meant it for a boys' school. There were no students at Avon last week. The only sign of schoolboy life was a boy named Butch, busy tacking up college pennants in a monklike cubicle in one of the dormitories, installing model airplanes, and littering up the joint after the fashion of twelve-year...
...Spit & Matchstick. As "depression architects," the partners had learned all about making a dollar go far. On one of their first jobs-redesigning Los Angeles' Clifton's Cafeteria in 1933-they took out their fees in meals. When their plans won first place in a competition for the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Wurdeman, a good man with a racket, spent his share of the fee to join the Westside Tennis Club-and incidentally to get some business from its Hollywood members. Soon Wurdeman & Becket were building actors' homes by the dozen. From then on, as Wurdeman says...
...Walt & Welt's home designing on a mass production basis. They put up housing for 50,000 workers in California's mushrooming war industries, and soon they had 83 assistants working for them. "It was spit and matchstick stuff," Wurdeman says, "but it made us build a big organization and got us so we weren't appalled at big jobs...