Word: western
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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South of St. Louis (Warner) actually takes place just north of the Rio Grande. A Technicolored western, masquerading in fits & starts as a chunk of Civil War history, it has a doubleheader love story and a hydra-headed plot...
...Minor Vices (Enterprise; MGM) is a major indiscretion employing three able stars directed by Lewis (All Quiet on the Western Front) Milestone. It is a painfully misconceived attempt to stretch out and puff up a frail piece of whimsy into a frothy comedy...
...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...
...book. But the reader who thinks this modest pronouncement means that dignified Poet Eliot is going to settle down to a donnish little tussle with Noah Webster had better brace himself for a shock. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot advances a view of present-day western civilization that is as pessimistic as his famed post-World War I opus, The Waste Land. What's in a Word? U.S.-born T.S. Eliot migrated to England in 1914, and quickly became what he is today, the English-speaking world's most distinguished poet and literary critic...
Thus, says Eliot, is the grand total of the word culture smashed into bits and pieces of semitruths. To reassemble it and grasp its full significance, he insists, the western world must first realize that all aspects of culture are not only related to each other but must overlap and interlock in such a way that they form a living whole...