Word: stiffening
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Largo (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by The Playwrights' Company) brought Paul Muni back to Broadway after seven years in Hollywood. It also proved to be Maxwell Anderson's most serious play since Winterset. When Anderson gets really serious, the dilemmas of mankind stiffen their doughty horns, philosophy flaps its aerial wings, Webster's Unabridged donates its longest words, prose ascends to verse, and there is a general intimation that the Almighty is in the throes of mapping out the universe...
...hands, which he can use to equal effect playing the violin or smashing a face. The violin seems likely to win out with thoughtful Joe until Manager Tom Moody (Adolphe Menjou), threatened with the loss of a promising meal ticket, gets his girl, Lorna Moon (Barbara Stanwyck), to stiffen Joe's spine. In Clifford Odets' play, Joe never got much out of his fighting hands but a shiny roadster that he piled up against a tree. In the cinema Joe fares better...
...When Dean Helen Taft Manning of Bryn Mawr College-isolationist sister of Presidentially ambitious Senator Robert A. Taft who last week accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of "ballyhooing" war in order to play politics (see p. 21)-urged the same committee to stiffen the present neutrality law and make it more instead of less inflexible, arch-isolationist Senator Borah demanded: "Haven't the people [of the U. S.] already made up their minds who is right and who is wrong? The world is already at war. Already things have taken place which make other nations look...
...finished don't mean anything, don't convey any emotion, and could have been played twice as fast by Paderewski anyway. The true swing man tries to express sincerely, cleanly, and simply at all times the emotions and ideas which he feels. If you play fast, or loud, you stiffen up. The result is no swing...
Hitler-"Never. You speak of your passionate love for peace. . . . Then suddenly you stiffen, you tighten your fists, you stick out your chin and you speak of Italian force...