Word: vain
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...Dragnet. Robert Taylor is a veteran city detective in the hire of a pair of grafty little Caesars (George Raft and Robert Simon). When Taylor's kid brother (Steve Forrest), an honest rookie cop, identifies a smalltime toughie who can betray Raft and Simon, Sergeant Taylor tries in vain to get the deal squared. Inevitably, the honest brother is bumped off, and the bad brother sees the light. With Janet Leigh's assistance, Taylor hunts down and rubs out the killers in a routine gunfight...
...sympathy from the Somers' Queeg-like skipper. Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, U.S.N., 39, was vain and self-righteous; in 26 years at sea he had developed a fondness for quarterdeck sermons and main-deck floggings. He was aroused by the slightest threat to his position, and he soon hated Midshipman Spencer. As the cruise wore on, Spencer remained moodily aloof from his fellow middies, plied his cronies, Boatswain's Mate Sam Cromwell and Seaman Elisha Small, with illicit brandy and cigars. Soon Spencer was poring over charts of the West Indies, boasting wildly that he would take over...
Going Underground. Perhaps the dreariest city in Europe was Paris, principal shrine of all tourism, where sidewalk cafes stood empty most of the time and even the six remaining fiacre drivers looked in vain for customers. "I have had only two customers in a week," reported one. But even relatively abandoned Paris could point to a record number of arrivals as the more purposeful tourists, most of whom had booked their trips in advance without benefit of weather prophecy, poured in to see the sights they counted as "musts...
...main theme: "Christ-the Hope of the World." Speaking for the characteristic European point of view, Professor Schlink saw Christ's salvation not of the world but out of it. "Christ is the end of the world," he said. "The name of Christ is taken in vain if it is used as a slogan in this world's struggle for its own preservation . . . Jesus Christ then is the hope of the world . . . because he liberates us from all the binding ties of this world...
...world naturally looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independently of the ordinary currents of human action; a being readily capable of violent revolt or supreme sacrifice, a man, solitary, austere, to whom existence is no more than a duty, yet a duty to be faithfully discharged. He was indeed a dweller upon...