Word: adroitness
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...orator, Mr. Borah's chief characteristics are deliberateness, earnestness and a meticulous selection of words. He speaks without notes, says ''If you don't get any new thoughts while on your feet you'd better sit down." An adroit phrase maker, he knows the dramatic value of repetition. It was Borah who said of Mexico: "God made us neighbors; let justice make us friends." Daniel Webster is his political hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson his philosophic guide, Honore Balzac his chief source of literary amusement. Once in puritanical disgust he burned a whole set of Frank...
Little Caesar (First National). Undoubtedly the most familiar of current screen figures is the fearless, ambitious gangster who becomes rich on the fruits of evil and dies in the last reel in a heroic manner. With less adroit handling Little Caesar might easily have been no more than a fair program picture and its central character merely a reflection of his many forerunners. Instead, Actor Edward G. Robinson has made his role the supreme embodiment of a type. He is helped by Mervyn Leroy's fine directing and by the fact that W. R. Burnett's story was comprehensive, telling...
Lightnin' (Fox). The old play which the late Frank Bacon helped to write and which he played 1,291 times on Broadway is now a vehicle for some adroit homespun fooling by Will Rogers. It is not so good as a picture as it was on the stage because the camera too often follows wandering sequences of the plot, but it is handsomely arranged and fairly funny. Will Rogers seems to enjoy himself as the boozing but golden-hearted rustic whose only decisive action is a refusal to sign papers that would have permitted his wife to sell...
Windows higher up were shattered by pistol shots. Jewish-owned cafés and banks suffered similar pane-smashes. So adroit was the whole piece of vandalism, so swiftly did the stonethrowers disperse, that when police arrived, frantically summoned by the Jewish store owners, there was nobody to be arrested except very large crowds of curious, innocent by- standers...
...most fundamental and primitive reactions of the race, and until comparatively recent times the college student has been singularly fortunate in the achievement of such preeminence. But of late years the feverish exploitation of gin, necking, and sartorial eccentricities has been to no avail against the far more adroit advertising of Masons, Elks and the Ku Klux Klan, and the unfortunate collegian is faced with the possibility of being recognized by the public in all his shame as a perfectly normal individual...