Word: swirl
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Goodbye to All That. The leading lady of the great tradition is expected to resemble the gyascutus. prock, tree squeak and swamp gaboon rolled into one. Bernhardt, it is said, would swirl onstage with "eyes that resembled holes burned into a sheet of paper"; her lines she sang in a melodious but somewhat fruity "voice of gold." Rumor had it that she slumbered in a coffin lined with silk. The majestic Modjeska once held a U.S. audience "clutched in [her] spell" with a heartbreaking recital of what she later admitted was the Polish alphabet, and the mighty Duse would petulantly...
Svengali (M-G-M). Faced with making a 1955 movie out of Trilby, George du Maurier's period novel of 1894, Director Noel Langley decided to play the story straight. As a result, moviegoers get a full treatment of the giant-sized nobilities and epic despairs that swirl up from Victorian drama, reflected in the iridescent mirror of fin de siecle Paris...
...Lovers uses a breezy class-of-'55 lingo to shine up the ancient story of boy-mates-girl. Author Halevy, a 35-year-old New Yorker, scores his first-novel romance with a bustling big-city sound track. Subway doors snap shut like guillotines, shreds of dirty newspapers swirl along the avenues instead of autumn leaves, a joyless Village party gets high on marijuana and low on clothes; and all the time the two lovers sleepwalk their poignant way between the steel-and-glass monuments and the human ruins...
...museum's walls were covered with moody, swirling blobs of color, as otherworldly as their titles (Strata No. 1, Tones of Silence, Pad '55). Only here and there does an oldtimer hold out. Ben Shahn in Second Super Market makes a tasteful composition out of wire grocery carts; the '303 echo in Philip Evergood's Quick Lunch, a ham-handed working man swigging a soft drink; Morris Graves's Bird is deftly caught on thin rice paper with a Chinese economy of line. But they are small islands of representation in a swirl of abstraction...
...Bandung's dusty streets, fezzes mingled with turbans, longyis with Bond Street suits. A swirl of exotic prophets, devious schemers and earnest advocates swarmed in from afar to urge their causes. Resplendent in a red tarboosh and black gown, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem materialized like a wraith from the past. There was a young Turkestani from Brooklyn to protest against the "tragic conditions of Moslems in the Soviet Union and China," a delegation from South Africa to urge condemnation of apartheid...