Word: villainized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Grey (Gainsborough-Universal) is a heavily romantic, British-made melodrama tailored for the matinee trade. Adapted from a sugary, swashbuckling novel by the late Lady Eleanor Smith, it is a Regency costume piece containing all the time-tested materials: a gypsy fortuneteller; a scowling, black-browed villain; a gushy diary kept by a doe-eyed girl named Clarissa who munches candied violets; a wavy-haired hero with beautiful strong teeth; a fire-breathing adventuress who dotes on discord and low-cut gowns...
...picture's production tricks are obvious enough but very effective: no one ever moves without glancing back over his shoulder; the camera eye blurs with rage as Powell's fists beat & beat at the villain's face; the screen goes black while the hero fumbles about in a dark room ; two characters hold an important conversation near a subway track so that nearly every sentence is suspensefully interrupted by the roar of a passing train...
...Panic has boned up this time on the ancient Picts, the psychology of juvenile delinquency and Poe's Purloined Letter. She turns it all into a pretty exciting chase across the Scottish moors. When it's all over, the critical reader may feel as trapped as the villain by the plot's hard-to-believe major premise. Verdict: very good...
...live. But her naturally high voltage and low taste in friends apparently mark her from the beginning as the victim of a crime of passion. When she is rubbed out, tedium sets in. The scene finally gets so crowded with suspicious-looking people that by the time the villain is led away to jail you have the feeling that far too many untrustworthy characters are still lurking about on the wrong side of the bars...
Some readers may lay down this book with a feeling that they have been cheated by a study in which neither party to an inflamed political dispute is indicted as a thoroughgoing villain. Others will find in the book's 114 pages most of the materials necessary to an understanding of the Polish problem. Though the authors are concerned with the dispassionate investigation of history, they make one telling political point: the key to political control of Poland today is agrarian reform. This key is wholly in the hands of Poland's Moscow-dominated government...