Word: superbeings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hands of a lesser director than Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, Stage Door) this theme might well have turned sour. By superb cinema artistry he raises it to the level of subtle, entertaining comedy without losing sight of its basic problem. That tour de force is a rare cinema triumph...
Last week, to the great, grim tragedy of France was added the Nazi Terror. With superb irony, its setting was Paris' shoddy, working-class XIe Arrondissement (eleventh ward), once the cradle, now the abattoir of French Republicanism. France was stirring against the Germans and the Germans had no intention of letting the stir progress to an upheaval...
...their hours were spent in intensive business. Churchill, in spite of his lisp (which he suppresses when he makes a speech), is a superb story teller, with an irony that eats like slow acid. The President, utterly fluent, is an engaging conversationalist. Two such men do not get quickly to the subject of their business...
...last week the Army was well-housed. From the beginning it had been well-fed. For its training-far from complete and still hampered by shortages of equipment-it is getting more practical field exercises than any U.S. Army ever had before. Its physical condition is superb. Some of its divisions are readier for combat service than any sent to Europe...
Most of these 19 stories exhale a cold horror for middle-class English life. As diagnoses of that horror they are sometimes subtle, brilliant, beautifully written; as often supersubtle, over-clever, strangled in preciosity. At best their sinister quality is superb; at worst they deal melodramatically with jilted servants, out-of-season hotels, loveless homes, other social and psychological frigidities so overused that they might almost people a 20th-century, air-conditioned Castle of Otranto. In her almost frantic straining after artistry, Miss Bowen often frustrates her first-rate talent. But she is one of few writers alive who comes...