Word: 20s
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Last week Showman Billy Rose put on his third revue at his two-year-old Manhattan nostalgia palace, the Diamond Horseshoe cabaret. For this show Rose dug up several pre-and-early-'20s cinema stars. Master of ceremonies was grey-haired Carlyle Blackwell, who was a notable glamor boy during the Wilson Administration. The lush Nita Naldi, whose heroic scale bust was a feature of Rudolph Valentino's Blood and Sand, gave a smoldering recital of Kipling's The Vampire. Shimmy-shaking Gilda Gray didn't attempt the racking vibrations of her youth, but heaved...
Last week at the Diamond Horseshoe, Mae Murray again began dancing the Merry Widow waltz, with Georges Fontana of the sleek '20s dancing team of Moss & Fontana. The featherweight toast of the 1908 Follies has long since moved into the middleweight division, but as she swooped, swirled and was flung through the air the house came down, and Billy Rose knew that he had a waltzing hit and the nostalgic smash of his career...
...Niebuhr's "conversion" is a sign of the times. In the easy '20s sin was becoming an archaism, like the devil's tail and angels with six wings. Calvin Coolidge's preacher was against it, but liberal clergymen were accepting the Platonic conception of sin as ignorance, echoing the words of Socrates that no man knowingly does that which is wrong. The doctrine of progressive evolution had helped explain away the existence of evil in a God-made world; humanity seemed to be getting better and better; and righteousness was somehow just around the corner...
World's End closed with Lanny's departure from the Versailles Conference. Between Two Worlds opens at Bienvenu, a villa on the French Riviera, from which base Lanny can examine Europe of the '20s. He lives there with Beauty, his full-blown, flighty mother, and their friend Kurt, an ex-agent of the Kaiser who composes music and smolders over the bitter treatment of the Fatherland. Now & then Lanny's friend Rick turns up. He had wanted to be a dramatist, but as the decade progresses he becomes a leftish journalist. Not infrequently Father Budd dashes...
...cursory but abundant and palatable; the excursions into art and love combine "progressive" views with a captivating boyishness. The book is perhaps above all impressive as a demonstration that an almost moronic cheerfulness is not necessarily the foe of intelligence and sincerity, of which Sinclair has plenty. The '20s were a crazy, tragicomic incubator of a catastrophic future. Sinclair makes that, and the grim lines which sharpen their terrible convergence a few years later, perfectly clear. He also makes his whole 859-page canvas as shamelessly ingratiating as a barroom nude...