Word: italian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Adolf Hitler's generals know what they are about. They have studied their Erich Ludendorff and their Giulio Douhet (an Italian theoretician who says that modern war must be fought with mass air attacks). They knew that their advance into Poland would be a pushover. Nevertheless their tactic was a Ludendorff infiltration, modified to suit a mechanized army. Long steel fingers reached into Poland's flesh, then clamped together and squeezed the blood out. This they did with speed which was only less amazing than their efficiency...
...dragged aboard the dinghy. On the third night of drifting without food or water, they sighted a ship. The first mate took out his bosun's whistle and "blew and blew and blew for some twenty minutes. It was that tiny whistle that made the Italian rescue ship [Provvidenza] change her course and head for us. They let down a rope ladder, but we all had to be helped to be dragged up. Whiskey and wine were given to the men. Auntie and I drank water. We refused food, we were that tired. So they...
...piece of music, the present company gives it the drubbing of a high-school band. Pathetic gags meant to reveal the simple natures of the characters are played for comedy lines. June Walker is a likable if unimpressive heroine, but Giuseppe Sterni's only virtue is his authentic Italian accent, and the Napa Valley is not the part of California where Cinemactor Douglass Montgomery is most at home...
Down-to-earth is Playwright Howard's tale of an elderly Italian winegrower in the Napa Valley who courts a San Francisco waitress by mail, palming off his handsome young foreman's photograph as his own; of the girl's disillusionment on seeing him, her going through with the marriage, her transgression with the foreman. It is a triangle story solved by arithmetic, not geometry. The girl most wants a home, the old man a wife, the young man his freedom. So Playwright Howard, without cynicism, urges his bewildered people to be sensible, and quietly laughs melodrama...
...himself running in the dark through a camp of Franco's troops. He was one of four, out of a detachment of 70, that got across the Ebro into relative safety. After that the men knew that the People's Army was being overpowered by German and Italian force, that they were the tail-end of the International volunteers. Scared Spanish boys came in as replacements, together with deserters and "goldbricks" once thought unfit for fighting. One soldier wept. "They killed all the good guys," he said. "I seen guys die had more room between the eyes than...