Word: vein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Klondike Vein. A Wilber TV play is often spiced with Spillane-type violence: a flogging or a torture scene or a near-lynching. His heroines are outright symbols of purity, his villains 'are double-dyed, his heroes are properly heroic. A TV producer describes the typical Wilber melodrama as "a handling of clichés that somehow keeps the viewer from realizing he's watching clichés." Wilber's favorite author is Jack London but, he admits, "I've never read much of London or anyone else." He has seen only one stage play...
...Mile and Two Pale Horsemen. Alaska also gave him a touch of gold fever. He does not think of TV writing as a lifework. What he wants to do is make enough money to head back to the Klondike in style. He says, mysteriously: "I know of a lost vein on a ridge between the Chitanana and the Cosna Rivers. I'm going to go back there...
...doctors called Roger's condition "precarious." He was still in a deep coma, his brain numbed by scant circulation because the operation had left him without a sagittal vein to carry blood from the top of the brain back toward the heart. Roger had no life functions except the most elemental and automatic: breathing, digestion and elimination. Rodney, who got the sagittal vein which the twins had formerly shared, drifted in & out of sleep. Awake, Rodney showed the same powers of observation and speech as before the operation, but was still groggy from the ordeal. His condition was "critical...
Then the doctors learned the worst: each baby, to have a complete and independent circulatory system, should have had a big vein (unaptly called a sagittal sinus) running fore & aft along the top of his brain to gather blood from smaller vessels and deliver it, through the jugular, back to the heart. The twins had only one. There was no way to divide it, no way to make another. One baby had to get it, and with it, a good chance to survive. The other must almost certainly perish. Little Rodney had the better chance to live, anyway...
...worthy effort to avoid trumped-up melodrama, The Brave Don't Cry sometimes seems barren of drama as well. Though it does not dig into its theme as deeply as the German Kameradschaft (1931) and the British The Stars Look Down (1939), it mines its particular dramatic vein, i.e., the ennobling dignity of man's courage, with honesty and fidelity...