Word: grading
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...life, in a disjointed course that lacks both interest and conviction. A weak-kneed attempt to build up Verdi as a nationalist idol bogs down in conventional heroics. In a last desperate effort at unity, the director drags in a love complication as profoundly touching as Hollywood's grade C productions. Never reaching beyond the suggestive, the picture loses itself in a maze of episodic trivia...
...successful seizure of Norway must have looked considerable to Herr Hitler: air bases only an hour (instead of two) from Great Britain's naval bases and shipyards; windows on the Atlantic for his "living room," now stifling behind the Allied blockade; control of Sweden and her high-grade iron ore, which Hitler's war machine must have; demonstration to Benito Mussolini of the supremacy of air power over sea power. Above all, there was the gain of seizing the initiative, re-asserting the Reich's dynamism. A magnificent demonstration of Might upon weak Norway might topple...
With the benefit of low grade B dialogue and the technicolor of five years ago, this attempt might have been entertaining, but even these meagre requirements have not been met with the result that the picture has all the zip of a three-day-old glass of beer...
...voice as that of The Shadow of a year prior. Compared to The Shadow's well-remembered activities, the War of the Worlds was tame stuff. On the whole, college-bred listeners who first thought the program was a news broadcast were twice as successful as grade-school graduates in detecting that what they heard was fiction. But generally, Dr. Cantril's researchers found, critical ability was affected by other factors tending to create susceptibility. Most significant of these were universal insecurity, worries, phobias, fatalism, war fear. To sum up, Dr. Cantril quoted the late Heywood Broun: "Jitters...
...last 33½ years jolly, auburn-haired Mrs. Marguerite S. Cunningham, 51, has taught in New York City's grade schools. She is a popular teacher, but her record is not unblemished. She has been absent from class 1,556 days, tardy 724 times. A big woman (5 ft. n, 275 lb.), she suffers from high blood pressure (see p. 72), walks with a cane...