Word: villainously
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...railroad electrification job, tells the story in his own words-a wisecracking lineman's lingo in which an angry character "arcs," gets "hotter than a wet switch''; a nosey one gets "ideas his head ain't insulated for." Like the piano playing of the villain, the plot is as "complicated as a six-track interlocking," contains as many trick effects as an electrical exposition. But when Author Haines writes straight description of wiring a low tunnel, his story delivers useful power...
...develops, is meant to be irresistibly attractive in a plump, helpless, middle-aged way. Her charm is unfortunately obscured, with the result that a perfectly honest suitor, a sinister looking Italian who deals in rugs, is mistaken in the first act by most of the audience for a crafty villain with some base design to his wooing. He subsequently appears, however, for no worse end than to supply the impoverished family with some sorely needed cash at the opportune moment. This change of face is not intended, and if only someone in the show would explain that Mrs. Thomas...
...DARK COMMAND-W. R. Burnett -Knopf ($2.50). Lickity-split romance against a background of Kansas-Missouri border fighting; by the author of Little Caesar. A supplementary four-page leaflet explains who his Confederate villain was in real life, makes better reading than much of the novel...
Vardis Fisher's candid, uneven, sometimes powerful tetralogy (In Tragic Life, Passions Spin the Plot, We Are Betrayed, No Villain Need Be) reminded critics of Rousseau, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Dreiser, D. H. Lawrence (but not, oddly enough, of Thomas Wolfe). This four-decker autobiographical chronicle told the tormented story of Vardis Fisher's fight to free himself from acute egomania and puritan repressions...
This play, despite the social axe it has to grind, is pretty much of the famous old black-and-white melodrama. Wall Street is perhaps the real villain, and it is indicted for the murder of all its speculators and their souls. But the old veteran bull, Nicholas Vanalstyne, though he relishes smashing his enemies, wouldn't think of leaving an orphan or a widow dispossessed by him to suffer in penury. His son, heir, and namesake, however, is a rotter pure and simple. He has lived in sin, but he throws the odium of the crime on his innocent...