Word: tragical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...guerrilla leader, Pablo, Hemingway's terrible symbol of a man devastated by the fear of death, Akim Tamiroff has some magnificent, all but tragic moments. As Pilar, Hemingway's salty symbol of Spain's people, Greek Actress Katina Paxinou would walk away with any less leaden show. Her hawk-fine face, wallowing walk, Goyaesque style and Noah Beery laugh assure her a rich future, if only she can find roles spacious enough. As the Soviet journalist, Karkov, Konstantin Shayne makes his characterization of a political commissar the most electrifying bit in years...
...despot. He had screamed at his underlings, plucked roses in his garden, aired his Anglophobia, played the island's strategic position, idle warships and hoarded gold against U.S. pressure. Now he refused utterly to deal with the Committee of Liberation. Said Henri Hoppenot: the Admiral was in a "tragic frame of mind . . . suffering from a Messianic complex and retaining a fanatic loyalty to Petain." From Martinique Georges Robert went into exile in U.S. Puerto Rico, under the protection of the U.S. Navy...
...shots-90% from newsreels and confiscated enemy films-rise to levels of tragic poetry (a drum-deafened sequence of hordes of marching Axis children, youths, men in uniform, and the dazed faces of their elders) and pity and terror (a shrill, doomed maggot-swarm of naked, newborn, state-ticketed Axis babies). There is some effort-there might well have been more-to demonstrate the United Nations' shameful failure to realize the intimate connection between their fate and that of a ravaged Manchurian hut in 1931. There is also a 1939 newsreel, a poll of man-in-the-street views...
...result, says McWilliams, was tragic. The Indians were used to tribal ownership; once their holdings became individual they fell prey to swindlers and land-grabbers; their cultural and social solidarity fell apart. (This, McWilliams believes, was the intention of the Dawes Act.) Their language was suppressed in schools ("truly nightmarish institutions"), their religious ceremonies discouraged, their arts and crafts allowed to fade away. By 1923 they had declined in numbers "from the pre-Columbian estimate of 850,000 to around...
...have a sound function. From their study men have gained a sensitive response to the best that has been thought and said, a deep historical perspective which arms against contemporary problems, and a strengthening intellectual discipline. Liberal education is not at an end. It is stalled, and the present tragic interval in its growth has at least this much of good: everywhere it is under scrutiny. That scrutiny should lead to a new driving impulse, related to a new purposefulness...