Word: yarns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Melba (real name: Nellie Mitchell), after whom Melba toast and the peach Melba were named. It is a rich, creamy, Technicolored movie biography that consists of a series of arias, as Mme. Melba moves from one operatic triumph to another. The songs are imbedded in a fictionalized, soggily romantic yarn about the men in the diva's life: her Australian husband (John McCallum), who walked out on her (in real life, Melba left him and their child to take up an operatic career in Paris); a rich London playboy (John Justin), who helped her get started on her career...
...City Is Dark (Warner) is a cops & robbers movie that captures some of the hard-hitting realism of the early-'30s gangster pictures. It spins a familiar yarn about a reformed ex-con (well played by Hoofer Gene Nelson in a nondancing role) whose past catches up with him when an escaped San Quentin prisoner (Ted De Corsia) tries to force him to join in a bank heist. This time the cop is a hard-eyed, tough-fisted police sergeant (Sterling Hayden...
...MINGLED YARN (172 pp.)-H. M. Tomlinson-Bobbs-Merrill...
Tomlinson is one of those men who were born too late. In A Mingled Yarn, a collection of 18 essays written over the last 40 years, it becomes plain that he would have been happy to run his course during the 19th century. That is only natural for a man who "was a little Londoner when Carlyle was living higher up the river, and . . . was reading Stevenson when his early tales were appearing serially." But Tomlinson's hankering for the past is not merely an exercise of simple sentiment. To be sure, there is the oldster's yearning...
...beads strung on A Mingled Yarn are not an oldster's complaints. There are fine descriptive sketches of far places, in which exact description and smoldering imagination are firmly wedded. There are moving tributes to the British character, a splendid essay on a family pet (A Brown Owl) which once stared down Thomas Hardy. This is a book to remind readers of any age of the rich resources of written English. If nothing else, Author Tomlinson proves that the informal essay, that sad casualty of modern literature, can be as effective as a heart-to-heart talk...