Word: inquisitor
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...increased its assets another 67% to $539,585,596. By March 1931, when U. S. business began a steep two-year nose dive, United had increased its assets to a peak of $594,603,470. Two years later during the famed investigation which sired the Securities Exchange Act, Inquisitor Ferdinand Pecora brought out that at that peak the "United group" controlled 22-to-23% of U. S. electric production, some 22% of gas output; and that its half billion dollars of common stocks had brought under Morgan domination a utility empire* ("worth...
With such implacable people Playwright Hellman has dealt implacably, exerting against them a moral pressure to match their own immoral strength. Both the Hubbards and their playwright-inquisitor work at a pitch too relentless for real life. But it is the special nature of the theatre to raise emotions to higher power, somewhat simplifying, somewhat exaggerating, but tremendously intensifying. Playwright Hellman makes her plot crouch, coil, dart like a snake; lets her big scenes turn boldly on melodrama. Melodrama has become a word to frighten nice-nelly playwrights with; but, beyond its own power to excite, it can stir...
...House, with more of Washington's shoe-polish than of Texas' alkali on his boots. Martin Dies had, with all his unfairness as a prosecutor and ineptitude as an investigator, become the Opposition's favorite splinter in the Administration's fundament. His continuance as an inquisitor specifically demonstrated other things...
...flashes of Duranty, Gunther, Sheean; but for character vignettes and earthy episodes, he beats the lot. Examples: >The headmaster of his grammar school in Gorcum, Holland, was a tightlipped, frog-eyed, wrinkled Huguenot with the curling fingernails of a Chinese mandarin and the literal severity of a Spanish Inquisitor. He beat a boy to unconsciousness for writing the phrase "snowflakes fluttering from a pitilessly gray heavenly roof." Heaven, it seemed, was never pitiless. After morning prayers he took snuff, which made him sneeze so vehemently that he staggered. This staggering, says the author, was the only physical exercise he ever...
When at last the Examiner comes on board to judge them, the audience settles back to relish the play's meatiest, juiciest moments. But they are also its weakest: the inquisitor is too whimsically conceived, vice is too glibly punished, virtue too sentimentally recompensed. Perhaps a better artist (though a less canny storyteller) would have rung down his curtain as his characters, in bewilderment and trepidation, reached the threshold of their eternal home. It takes at least a Dante to draw a convincing diagram of Hell...