Word: villainous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...favorite Communist morality play casts the Communists themselves as gulls and simpletons: a diabolically clever villain, an "enemy of the people," insinuates himself into the party, dupes the honest comrades, rises higher and higher, and finally is given top responsibilities and honors. All the while he is conniving with other "enemies of the people," internal or external. But at last the crafty wretch is "unmasked," and the honest comrades, roused from their torpid illusions, take their vengeance...
Probably no Communist will ever play the villain's role as sensationally as the late Lavrenty Beria of Moscow. But in Bucharest last week, Moscow's Rumanian satellites staged a highly professional road-show version of the melodrama, and the lead was played in fine style by Vasile Luca, a Hungarian from Transylvania who climbed from a locksmith's shop to a Communist education in Moscow and up to the posts of Deputy Premier, Finance Minister and No. 3 Red in postwar Rumania. Purged in 1952, Luca has since been in prison. Last week Bucharest announced that...
...hero, who has been framed with a killing, rides into town to clear his name. It is not quite clear why he bothers: his name cleared, he just rides out again. Furthermore, it turns gut that the villain is not even the villain. About that time one of the actors mutters desperately, "Why did all this have to happen...
Laughton, of course, has hacked a large hole for himself in the theatre world, and the Inn's Squire Pengallen is a character comfortably fitted within its boundaries. A bulbous villain with the dining habits of Henry VIII and the heart of Captain Bligh, the Squire lives in opulence while anonymously leading a gang of shipwreckers. Laughton makes him a polished old rogue, who cheerfully entertains his victims with superb and comically obvious hypocrisy...
...auspicious beginning; in his 20 years as a professional guide, Franz grumbles, "for me, there has never been a rich Englishman waiting in a crevasse." Before the reader can say "Grüss Gott!" the three of them are belaying their way toward the summit, along with a tepid villain whom Rudi also rescues, for good measure. By the author of The White Tower and aimed at the schoolboy trade, this is a slick, readable fictionalized account of the 1865 conquest of the Matterhorn: half as high as Mt. Everest, and nearly half as interesting...