Word: twentieths
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pont Show of the Month: As a "renewer of old treasure," rather than a "maker of new molds," Thornton Wilder found in a one-act play by Prosper Merimee the seed of an idea for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714," he began it, "the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." It posed the intriguing question: Did they die by accident or by divine plan? Its prose was clean and classical, its characters adroitly limned and it was constructed with the delicacy...
...Twentieth Century: "Our truth was a half-truth, our fight a battle in the mist . . . and those who suffered and died in it were pawns in a complicated game between two totalitarian pretenders for world domination." So wrote ex-Communist Novelist Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler after he came home from Spain's civil war. As CBS's corrosive documentary, War in Spain, made grimly clear, the pretenders were Hitler and Mussolini on one side and Stalin on the other, and the game that divided a nation against itself was a grisly dress rehearsal for the greatest...
...catch its hackle-raising horrors, Twentieth Century searched around Europe last spring, out of a ten-mile tangle of celluloid salvaged 2,400 evocative feet, garnished it with an equally evocative script by Emmet John Hughes, author of Report from Spain (and now chief of TIME-LIFE'S foreign correspondents). There were some coruscant scenes: crying, cursing Madrileños "running faster, faster along the very edge of the abyss," truncheon-wielding cops beating them back; women and children being evacuated under heavy air bombardment, their life's possessions tied in burlap on their backs, or black coffins...
...describing the German expressionism of the twentieth century, the same adjectives keep reappearing. "Incisive" and "bold" are among the milder ones. "Brutal" really ought to be an epithet in art criticism, but in this connection it constantly arises as the laudatory description of a narrative school of art. In comparison, and often, unfortunately, in opposition, the modern art of France is cited as an opposed camp. The debate has been made to resemble an international conflict...
...poetry which makes the word brutal a sacrilege. Durer is as intellectual as the Expressionists are emotional, as richly controlled as the Expressionists, by and large, are sporadic. Again; the comparison may be unfair; but the teutonic bond between a Dance of Death by the younger Holbein and a twentieth century variation on the same theme is inevitable...