Word: cockney
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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With Edgar Wallace's background, an other writer might have been deflected from money-making by social conscience or social anger. By-blow of a provincial actress, adopted into a Cockney fishmonger family, he quit school at 12, worked as newsboy, printer's devil, hod carrier, milkman's helper, joined the army at 18, got plenty of hard knocks as he rose from jingo Boer War correspondent to London newspaper editor to rich writer. But said Edgar Wallace in later years: "There cannot be much wrong with a society which made possible the rise of . . . Edgar Wallace...
...Wart also encounters a witch, a giant who apparently represents 20th-century totalitarianism, and Robin Hood, whose real name, according to White, was Robin Wood. (The W slurred off, and recent highbrow scholars, thinking 'ood a Cockney abbreviation, added H.) After all his adventures the Wart still has strength enough to pull the legendary magic sword out of the anvil, win the right to be King Arthur...
Pygmalion (Gabriel Pascal) is Bernard Shaw's famed comedy about the transformation of a Cockney flower girl into a lady by a phonetics expert; the simultaneous transformation of the phonetics expert into a human being by the flower girl. As the first authorized, full-length screen version of a play by the world's No. 1 living dramatist, Pygmalion could scarcely have avoided being important. It could easily have avoided being good. As produced by Gabriel Pascal and acted by Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard, it is not merely good but practically perfect...
...dialogue for Pygmalion, which was taken verbatim from the stage play except for two new scenes showing Eliza's first bath and her first ball. In doing so, however, he showed his regard for American ideas to the extent of allowing most of Eliza's Cockney dialect in the opening scenes...
...suspense throughout, and Sabu the Hindu boy fits excellently into the life of a Himalayan tribe, yet the plot as a whole runs in too much of a groove to make the picture topnotch. Raymond Massey sneers well as the fanatic tribesman, and Desmond Tester is a very good cockney drummer...