Word: ven
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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John C. Beck's staging is at its best in some attractive groupings and funny bits, but his business is frequently over-busy, and occasional lost opportunities and miscellaneous lacks of clarity are discernible. The sets had to be simple and portable, since there are three of them; ven de shtate has videred avay, Ida will not have to be set against black curtains, but meanwhile let us praise the witty setpieces of James Peters, especially the down-left second-act tree, which has a neat bird painted...
...always thrilling, according to most movie biography scripts, to die at the very height of one's career. Chaney did just that in 1930, after spreading his versatile voice all over his only sound movie, a talking version of The Unholy Three, in which he played both a ven- triloquist and a fiendish old lady. There was a popular gag going around at that time about insects: "Don't step on it; it may be Lon Chaney in disguise!" Chaney regarded the quip as a true com- pliment...
...little Wally Wronken. A character who warms Marjorie's heart, and the reader's, is her uncle, Samson-Aaron, a robustious clown, a seam-splitting glutton, and a lovable dead-beat ("But a nickel, Modgerie, a nickel I always had, to buy you a Hershey bar ven I came to this house"). In his simple way, he shows Marjorie how close she really is to the faith she once brashly dismissed as a Stone Age relic...
...moving forward. In and around the cities, bulldozers, pneumatic drills and rivet guns played an unending symphony of progress on new homes, new factories, new office buildings. The "for gotten man" of New Deal days was ven turing his capital in small businesses -millinery shops, hamburger stands, ma chine shops. In labor-union meetings, most of the talk centered on how to get new benefits, not on how to keep up with a runaway cost of living. At the office coffee breaks, the talk was easy and calm, not about the coming war or the coming depression. Moderation...
...Author Conrad regards Gulf Stream North as the completion of an "idiom trilogy" that began with Scottsboro Boy and continued with Rock Bottom. When the men of the Moona Waa Togue "crap up the captain" (praise him), sing their work chanteys ("Who emptied out the bottles from hea-a-ven-n-n, and let the rain fall down-w-w-n-n?"), or joke about the odor of their cargo ("Mellow, eh fellow . . . Real mellow, fellow"), their talk seems the bonus catch in Author Conrad...