Word: yarns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...prefers to clamp a character in the vise of a strange situation, watch him wriggle toward nobility, degradation, or death. At his best, Author Steele can stir a jigger of irony, a dash of adventure, a sprig of the exotic and a pinch of mystery into a tippling good yarn. At his worst, he makes the tricks of Fate look like the hoked-up tricks of the trade...
...away from home and hid out on the common; it was a deeply humiliating anticlimax when his big sister flushed him out after a few hours.) A boy could also escape by reading. Graham was 14 when he read Marjorie Bowen's * The Viper of Milan, a melodramatic yarn about a war between the dukes of Milan and Verona, and "from that moment I began to write...
Crisply directed by Robert Wise from a script by Edmund H. North, the movie is no sermon or diatribe. It makes its points with all the tang and suspense of a good adventure yarn. It has its rough spots in story-and no doubt in scientific -logic, but these are effectively smoothed over by the realism of actual Washington backgrounds, expert technical effects and the presence of such radio news commentators as Drew Pearson, Elmer Davis and H. V. Kaltenborn, chattering away in the familiar accents of crisis...
...this point, The Birth of a World becomes a pell-mell yarn. Time & again, Revolutionist Bolivar's army was reduced to a handful of men. With despairing patience he wrote articles and letters urging military discipline, an end to jealousy and anarchy among the patriot leaders. "Our army," he wrote, "is a sack with a hole at the bottom"-words that might have come from Valley Forge. Through sheer necessity, he became a brilliant guerrilla campaigner, making up in mobility and surprise what he lacked in numbers. Before he was through, he and his followers had routed the Spaniards...
...tells a turn-of-the-century yarn about a cocksure, middle-aged Maine farmer who goes around unsuccessfully hunting a second wife. All the time his capable, attractive housekeeper (Billie Worth) silently yearns for him, though-except for the fact that he is Joe E. Brown -there's no telling why. The tale has little substance and less suspense, and has to pad out its skimpy plot with a lot of courting among the younger...