Word: themes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Moonlight Sonata (Pall Mall) has its soul in Parnassus, its feet in Grub Street. A trite British treatment of cinema's tritest theme, it makes the wobbly point that music hath charms to shoo the city slicker out of the country girl's heart. But what lofts it to the skies for two memorable reels is the piano-playing of 77-year-old Ignace Jan Paderewski, most notable pianist of his time, in cinema a tired old man in a tacky dress suit, a mismanaged...
...Fair Rehearsal" in Flushing Meadow Park. As the rolling snowball of Fair publicity thus gained momentum one year from the finish line, Manhattanites began to be aware of another ball-"biggest ever built by man" -which will be white, hollow, 200 ft. in diameter, 18 stories high, and the Theme Centre of the World's Fair. The steel frames of this Perisphere and the Trylon (a three-sided obelisk 700 ft. high) which will stand beside it, were already last week the most conspicuous structures at the Fair grounds...
...opinion of blunt Manhattan Park Commissioner Robert Moses, "Barnum had his sacred white elephant and every fair is entitled to at least one theme tower." More irreverent remarks than this have been made about the esthetic and symbolic value of the Fair's great ball and spike. At the other extreme, the Fair's publicity department, whose lyricism is more than adequate to its task, has described the Perisphere as symbolic of the all-inclusive World of Tomorrow and the Trylon as a Pointer to Infinity. To the architects who designed the centre, however, the Perisphere and Trylon...
Longheaded, high-domed Wallace Kirkman Harrison and affable mustached J. (for Jacques) André Fouilhoux were among the architects who planned Rockefeller Center. They share a predilection for economy in architectural form. In evolving their Theme Centre for the Fair they made more than 1,000 sketches before they hit on the ultimate starkness of sphere and pyramidal form. Neither had ever been built before; both would certainly influence other World's Fair architecture to avoid superfluous dressing. And though neither the Sphere nor the symmetrical Trylon alone could serve as a direction-pointing landmark to guide wanderers...
...thus hammering home the theme that "high-pressure salesmanship" of the manufacturers has contributed to the present automobile glut, Gardner Withrow several times used phrases direct from a press conference of Franklin Roosevelt's along those lines four months ago (TIME, Jan. 17). According to Mr. Withrow this forcing of the market amounts to more than 1,000,000 used cars a year and largely accounts for the annual mortality of from 17% to 25% of dealer establishments. His words brought cheers from the dealers, though a few of them voiced fear of "bureaucratic Government control...