Word: hero
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...over the world his faithful followers prepared to celebrate the august birthday. To Moscow journeyed the satraps to pay homage. Russia's state music publishing house issued 45 separate Stalin songs, bearing titles such as To the Great Stalin-Glory, Our Strength-Stalin, and You Are Our Hero. The Bulgarian city of Varna on the Black Sea reported that it had changed its name to Stalin. The Czechs sent word that they had renamed their highest mountain, Gerlachovka (8,737 ft.), Mt. Stalin...
Silver Spoon. No rags-to-riches hero, Ernest Kurth is the son of a German immigrant who came to Texas in 1871 and pioneered the South's lumber industry...
...Closing Door (by Alexander Knox; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is melodrama that raids psychopathology for its thrills. What its door is closing on, with what threatens to be a deafening bang, is the sanity of the hero. Sullen, suspicious, harrowed by dark memories, Vail Trahern (Alexander Knox) can still, after a quieting talk with his wife (Doris Nolan), agree to go to a sanitarium for treatment. Then, thrown off balance again, he runs off, has somebody else turn up at the sanitarium in his name, and steals back home to precipitate a ghastly mess...
...story concerns a typical Italian unheroic hero: a vacillating, tortured, sour-faced working man (Lamberto Maggiorani) whose only talent is to attract misery. He and his small son (Enzo Staiola) spend a grey Sunday scouring Rome for the stolen bicycle that is necessary to the father's bill-posting job. Their thief-chasing Odyssey takes them through various institutions (soup kitchen, church, bordello, political meeting, fortuneteller's), supposed to inspire or comfort the miserable. After being treated as a bumbling nuisance at each of these havens, the hero tries unsuccessfully to steal a bicycle, and then tearfully walks...
This sort of journey-through-society script might have led to a movie that really moved with the erratic spontaneity of street life. But The Bicycle Thief is oddly static. Events move predictably and almost mechanically. Each small experience of the distraught hero is meticulously rounded and forced in sentiment, character coloring and social comment.Even the minor movements of the actors-the boy's tumble on a rainy street, the mother's fingering of her cheek-appear overrehearsed...