Word: dreariest
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Four Winds is rather like something by Noel Coward as adapted by a German moralist and retranslated into English. In a certain sense, through its own gift of tediousness and soggy small talk, it mirrors an expensively empty world. But its truths are the dreariest truisms, its gamut a mere shuttling between the plushy and the preachy. It gives no new wrinkle to the lowlifes in highlife. Only the jangled sharpness with which English Actress Ann Todd plays the heroine has any resonance; all else is a blur of echoes and a drone of words...
...miles away from the Piessets in one of the dreariest slums of the same northern French city live wan and wasted Jeanne Derock, a local mill worker, her husband Jean-Baptiste, a wounded war veteran able to do only occasional work, and their five children, all of whom sleep in beds knocked together out of old fish crates by papa Derock...
...Author Grau makes ordinariness seem pressing. At least three of these nine stories are unsuccessful, but the remaining ones cover a variety of emotion and background that are remarkable in the work of a young author. The title story tells of a love affair between young Negroes in the dreariest and poorest part of a southern state, where the main recreations are boozing and fighting. Against this squalid background the affair has first the quality of a simple idyl, but after its bloody, tragic ending it takes on the shape of legend. In Joshua, which takes place during World...
Going Underground. Perhaps the dreariest city in Europe was Paris, principal shrine of all tourism, where sidewalk cafes stood empty most of the time and even the six remaining fiacre drivers looked in vain for customers. "I have had only two customers in a week," reported one. But even relatively abandoned Paris could point to a record number of arrivals as the more purposeful tourists, most of whom had booked their trips in advance without benefit of weather prophecy, poured in to see the sights they counted as "musts...
...Verdict. Has the critics' verdict over the years been right? Most theater people (when their own flops are not in question) grudgingly agree that there have been very few miscarriages of critical justice. "I try to keep in mind, even when viewing the dreariest efforts," says the Journal-American's McClain, "that the people involved are not criminals." There are times when the critics have been dead wrong, he adds, "but even an I.B.M. machine blows a gasket now and then...