Word: thumbnails
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Wellsians have frequently exclaimed that the world lost a satirist when Author Wells turned popular pamphleteer. In Brynhild he gives them further matter for exclamation, in such thumbnail flicks as these: "His normal expression was one of patient self-confidence, varied by lapses into great mobility when he was exercised by a business suggestion or anxious to be effective. Then he gesticulated, brought his face nearer to his interlocutor and spat slightly as he became emphatic. Finally he would wipe himself up so to speak and become suddenly immobile again, with his face interrogative and a little askew...
Before his stockholders gave him a rising vote of thanks last week, Mr. Teagle gave his stockholders a valedictory thumbnail sketch of Standard's growth during his administration. Having already reported 1936 profits of $97,000,000, Mr. Teagle noted: "The basis of our business is crude oil. In the year preceding my election our interests produced 9,658,000 bbl. In the year for which you have just had a report our production was 206,356,000 bbl. In 1916 our share of the total world production was less than 2%. Last year...
...agents, gives an unilluminating sketch of his own background, discusses the habits of gangsters and the weakness of law enforcement, retells the stories of the Factor, Bremer, Urschel and Robinson kidnappings, the deaths of Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger. Best parts of American Agent are its thumbnail biographies of public enemies: Verne Miller, migratory worker, parachute jumper, sergeant in the U. S. Army, who became a sheriff before he became a gangster, then posed as a wealthy oilman and joined exclusive clubs; George Ziegler, landscape engineer, University of Illinois football star, Army flyer, crack golfer and gentle...
...genuine mechanical ability, works as a mechanic for a time, gets along well with plain men when he sees them as individuals. But pursuit of the Big Money corrupts his native talents as well as his good nature, eventually kills him. Dos Passos frames the story of Anderson with thumbnail sketches of Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of scientific management; and Thorstein Veblen. Like Ford, Charley Anderson had native mechanical skill, loved to tinker with machines. Like Taylor, he suffered because he tried to speed up production, to make manufacture efficient, and shrank from the resulting hostility of workmen...
...turning what for an other director would be a commonplace "gag"' into a vital and important incident. In Broadway Bill, he makes a shot of the Higgins family lifting their soup spoons with terrifying regularity show exactly why Dan Brooks abhors their company. He makes a brilliant thumbnail caricature of Dan's amazing friend. Colonel Pettigrew, out of a sequence in which the two meet for lunch after a long separation, each hoping to borrow money from the other and neither having enough cash to pay the check. This ability and Frank Capra's knack for getting the best...