Word: absurd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...future is a "horrible prospect," said she, but she hoped that her action might "dispel the false, absurd and dangerous notion that Catholics cannot speak for themselves." The speaker was Sue Simone Ingersoll, 20, Roman Catholic and New Mexico's entry in this week's Miss Universe Pageant, and she was explaining to reporters in Long Beach, Calif, why she was defying her archbishop by appearing in public bathing-suit exhibitions...
...atmosphere. The outlandish results seemed more than satisfactory to French critics. "Nothing shocks us in this reconstitution," reported Le Canard Enchaineé "It is as if we were seeing an American film perfectly dubbed." Only the Paris Herald Tribune's Critic Thomas Quinn Curtiss spotted the movie as "absurd and scandalously inaccurate," labeled it a "silly, sour travesty of American life...
Irwin Bazelon has composed the most appropriate and witty musical score in the Festival's history. The opening dissonant notes, with their absurd instrumentation, immediately set the mood for farce. Here and there a xylophone is comically used. And Falstaff is often accompanied by a tuba solo--a coupling that is just as apt here as is the pairing of the tuba with Sancho Panza in Strauss' Don Quixote. (This production even includes the actual dumping of Falstaff into the Thames; and what Falstaff later calls his "kind of alacrity in sinking" is conveyed by a descending tuba scale...
Still, there are some good things about the show. Sammy Davis Jr., looking like an absurd Harlemization of Chico Marx, makes a wonderfully silly stinker out of Sportin' Life. The singing is generally good-particularly the comic bits by Pearl Bailey and the ballads by Adele Addison, who sings the role of Bess while Dorothy Dandridge acts it. And the color photography gains a remarkable lushness through the use of filters, though in time -2 hr. 36 min., including an intermission -the spectator may get tired of the sensation that he is watching the picture through amber-colored sunglasses...
...mess sergeant reported him for goofing off. Sent up before Captain Thomas Woods, his commanding officer, for disciplinary action, Pfc. God refused a company-punishment sentence of two hours of hard labor every day for 14 days, demanded a summary court-martial, as was his right-even in such absurd cases as this-under the new (1951) Uniform Code of Military Justice...