Word: gruffness
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Very little credit has ever gone to the gruff, dour little Chicago lawyer. He was 67 on March 15, and the most careful search of the records fails to show any major occasion in the 67 years where any substantial group of citizens or high officials (or even low officials) ever paid him any great tribute, named a street or a baby after him, sent him flowers or just told him they loved...
...completely conceived was the stage play that its leading character, heartless, ambitious Regina Giddens, is played by Tragedian Bette Davis with scarcely an accent's difference from gruff Tallulah Bankhead's interpretation of the original Broadway role. This was not Miss Davis' idea. She quarreled with gap-toothed Director William Wyler (Jezebel, Dead End) for her own version. He-or the play-won. Result: the films' foremost dramatic actress not only acts like Tallulah but looks like...
Delta started in June 1929, when gruff, farm-minded Collett Everman Woolman deserted his profitable crop-dusting business (done with Huff-Daland Dusters and other hedgehoppers) to ferry passengers between Dallas and Birmingham. For 16 months it looked like a good switch: passengers were more lucrative than insecticides, and safer. But in October 1930, postal officials pushed him off the airline map, gave a fat mail contract to rival American Airlines. Disgusted, Woolman sold his passenger equipment to American, went back to dusting...
...Pancho Villa, whom Actor Beery portrayed with the same mops and mows back in 1934. Nothing like Holbrook Blinn's stage Pancho of 21 years ago, whose function was to satirize the average American, is the Beery portrait. The Arizona ranch which Pancho raids is owned by a gruff old character in a wheel chair (Lionel Barrymore). Both dialogue and action are thus resolved into a prolonged contest between the stallion snorts of Actor Beery and the crosspatch snuffles of Actor Barrymore. Barely submerged under these churlish exteriors lie warm old hearts which rescue true love and the mortgage...
...lumber. But, at 55, success has not smoothed his edge. To a muddleheaded Government clerk who telephoned him to ask what should be done with a carload of shingles, he replied: "Print the Lord's Prayer on every one of them." He answers his own telephone with a gruff "MacMillan speaking." Once at a formal dinner there was a hushed lull while the diners waited for someone to say grace. The silence was broken by his boom: "MacMillan speaking...