Word: 1920s
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California had its own cataclysm in the 1920s: Prohibition. Many of Haraszthy's precious vines were ripped up. By the time of repeal in 1933, only a handful of vintners were left, turning out spirits supposedly for sacramental or pharmaceutical purposes. Against this dismal backdrop, Ernest and Julio Gallo entered the business...
...dance marathon staged by New York's City Center? Was that doughty cultural impresario succumbing to the nostalgia craze reviving the 1920s stunts in which competing couples danced away the night-and the day, and sometimes the night again? Not quite. The City Center American Dance Marathon '72, which ended last week at Manhattan's ANTA Theater, was devoted more to the delights of diversity than to endurance. Over a period of six weeks, 20 of the most ruggedly individual dance companies in the U.S. matched style and idea in stalwart succession...
Died. Reginald Owen, 85, veteran character actor who played stuffy English aristocrats in scores of films and stage plays; after a series of strokes; in Boise, Idaho. The son of an English brick maker, Owen came to the U.S. in the mid-1920s, and by 1929 had starred in his first Hollywood movie. In addition to his usual roles as upper-crusty Englishmen, he appeared as Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1933), a film for which he did his own screenplay, as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1938); and as the scheming politician in Affairs of State...
Culp, who is directing his first feature film, disdains coherence in favor of establishing a seedy L.A. milieu, which he does so well that the frenzied illogic of the narrative is almost forgotten. Chili-dog stands, musty apartments atrophied since the 1920s, labyrinthine ranch houses perched on the edge of cracking cliffs, all give Hickey and Boggs a fine, evocative sense of a seamy city rotting in the sunshine...
...continuing disdain in which 20th century composers hold the sax is also due in part to its ascendancy in the 1920s as a leading voice of dance and jazz bands. (Critic Leonard Feather once wrote that the coat of arms for F. Scott Fitzgerald could have been two alto saxophones rampant on a field of cocktail shakers.) Even so, the sax had to overcome the prejudice of old-line jazz purists. Trumpeter Bunk Johnson once complained that it did not fit into the traditional New Orleans ensemble of trumpet, trombone and clarinet. "It just runs up and downstairs with...