Word: adroit
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...adroit ploy by the most popular leader in the Arab world, an effort to turn ignominy into personal triumph -and it worked. Angry Algerian street mobs who had been shouting "Lynch Nasser!" suddenly changed their tune. Within 30 minutes Iraqi President Abdel Rahman Aref was on the phone to Cairo urging Nasser to reconsider. Lebanese President Charles Helou wept openly when he heard the news. From Baghdad to Beirut, Arab mobs swept into the streets to demonstrate for Nasser. Often the demonstrations took on an ugly anti-Americanism, as in Beirut, where rioters were so unimaginative as to set fire...
...vaudeville. Each actor frantically does his bit and then gets offstage to make room for the jugglers. Niven comes off best because his stylish acting floats far above the script's witless, single-entendre standard: "Beauty is only skin-deep. How about some skin diving?" Allen provides an adroit parody of paranoia, as when he objects to going before a firing squad because he has "a low threshold of death...
...film is at its best when it takes affectionate backward glances: at Harold Lloyd with some adroit window ledgerdemain, at the Modcap costumes of the period, at such ricky-ticky tunes of the '20s as Baby Face and Japanese Sandman. But when nostalgia dims, so does the picture's brightness. The new songs by James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn are tepid at best, and Joe Layton's dance interludes are as spurious as bathtub gin, introduced solely to juice up a weak scenario...
...gory footage of Africa Addio is clearly genuine, and it is hard to deny the film's message: that much of the Dark Continent today is beset by violence and turmoil. But with a careful selection of film clips, an adroit director could make most parts of the world seem in the grip of terror-many far more so than Africa. Despite its lofty pretensions, the film has all too obviously been made for its shock value alone. As such, it is genuinely shocking. It is the value that is questionable...
...occasion and the oratory seemed routine, the response to Percy's adroit performance-in Nebraska and elsewhere-was considerably warmer than he could have anticipated. In fact, an increasing number of moderate-to-liberal Republicans fear that Michigan's Governor George Romney-still the pick of most G.O.P. centrists-may fade long before the convention. They are beginning to regard Chuck Percy as a potential candidate for the G.O.P. presidential nomination next year...