Word: waif
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Spring never promises anything to anybody. As each waif toddles into his throne room--and about 1,000 do so every day--he whines, "Ohhh, here's an old friend of Santa's!" He asks the tot what he wants for Christmas and, after listening attentively to the list, sends him off with a pat on the head and a cheery exhortation to "Be Good!" I felt this was rather ungenerous, and usually prefer to dismiss a child with, "All right! Santa won't forget you at Christmas!" or some such ambiguous statement...
...Mudlark (20th Century-Fox), based on Theodore Bonnet's 1949 bestseller, embroiders the legend of the slum waif whose naive devotion to the Crown coaxed Queen Victoria out of a 15-year solitude and awakened Parliament to its social responsibilities. Produced in England by U.S. moviemakers, the picture drew some British sniping, even before the cameras turned, for its casting of Irene Dunne as the Queen. The sniping was resumed when the film was picked as Britain's Command Performance movie in November...
...Hollywood pattern-not a very good pattern by the standards of moviemaking on either side of the Atlantic. A dashing young society gambler (Stewart Granger) promises a dying buddy to take his daughter out of an orphanage and give her a home. The girl (Jean Simmons) is an ungainly waif who takes Granger for her father. He finally sets her straight and packs her off to a Swiss finishing school, which returns her to him as a glamorous dish. She consents to marry, and he to reform. Actress Simmons, who freshens up the old ugly-duckling routine with her considerable...
Take a Sunny Morning. The eyes that finally see through Max to his sad and waif-like soul are the sleepy eyes of Mrs. Morgan's 18-year-old son Jimmy. An epileptic and a problem child who refuses to believe anything his tutors tell him about basic trends or the continuity of Western culture, Jimmy wears his mother down until she opens the nursery door, lets him go along with Divver on a trip to the Polish Corridor in the summer...
...camera spares India neither praise nor blame. It takes a passing glance at the high, cool beauties of Kashmir, the shaded Western luxuries of India's rich, and the dark, woebegone face of an Indian waif circled by three buzzing flies. It watches a family of Untouchables eating a nameless dirty mush, then joins a poor but caste-proud Brahman for a chaste meal of fruit and vegetables, arranged, as elegantly as a still-life painting, on a large plantain leaf...