Word: gallic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What made M. Céline an anti-Semite is explained with Gallic candor in the first 40 pages of Trifles for a Massacre. It appears that at 43, a successful novelist, War hero and practicing physician, Céline suddenly felt a great liking for dancing girls. To get acquainted with these attractive creatures he composed a ballet, filled with dancing shepherds, pure emotions, sweetness & light, and consequently much different from his usual pessimistic and obscene prose. It was rejected. Jewish musicians, actors and production managers, he decided, wanted the girls themselves. For the next 337 pages of Trifles...
...manner of "If I Had A Million," the picture takes a world-weary blonde (Mlle. Bell) in search of ten boys she had known in her youth. She had gone to her first ball, a card dance, when she was sixteen, and each of her partners with true Gallic gallantry had told her they loved her. Five she finds alive, a priest, a shyster, a hairdresser, an epileptic, and the mayor of a sunny little town in the Midi...
Generals Without Buttons (Forrester-Parant), a French film, has all the suave savvy of the French. Its Gallic point: that the things boys do are no more absurd than the things men do, especially in love & war. With the polished simplicity of a parable, the frugal neatness of good homespun, and a cast of eager, fresh child actors, Generals Without Buttons retells in cinema the gently satirical story that young French Author Louis Pergaud told in La Guerre des Boutons, shortly before he went to his death at Verdun...
...that readers would have been well informed about the Forsytes' sexual life. In The Pasquier Chronicles Georges Duhamel has done for his temperamental, crockery-smashing Pasquiers what Galsworthy did for his stiff-lipped Forsytes- told their tedious story with too many words-but he has enlivened it with Gallic interludes of scandals, passions and continental amours, any one of which would have been a major blot on the Forsyte escutcheon. Otherwise a puffy, ill-proportioned novel (848 pages), The Pasquier Chronicles reaches its modest distinction only when its central character, the tireless Papa Pasquier, gets involved in so many...
...soft-pedaling propaganda and modern meanings, by roaring straight ahead with pistol shots, slugfests, savage hysteria, explosions of Gallic wrath, Haiti becomes two hours' worth of good old-fashioned theatre. But one modern meaning arises spontaneously: When the Haitians win their freedom from the French at the end, the Negroes in the audience burst into frenzied, deep-throated applause...