Word: basil
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Ford Theater (Fri. 9 p.m., CBS-TV). Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Stickney and Walter Hampden in On Borrowed Time...
...Toad Disney is back where he belongs-in the world of inspired fauna and improbable flora. J. Thaddeus Toad, madcap scion of an ancient family of landed British amphibians and a passionate gadgeteer, comes near being one of his liveliest, most lovable creations. Narrated with crisp anonymity by Basil Rathbone, the film is packed with memorable moments: Toad chugging about on his rump in delirious imitation of a motorcar; his flight from jail through a dark blue night stitched red with running gunfire; the defeat of the thieving weasels in the epochal battle of Toad Hall. This lighthearted, fast-moving...
...Basil Rathbone tells the audience Toad inhabits his ancestral home, Toad Hall. Instead of acting with the dignity befitting a young man in such circumstances, Toad is a madcap adventurer, a faddist whose fancies often become manias of the most compulsive (and hilarious) sort. After cavorting about the countryside in a canary-yellow cart drawn by a horse named Cyril, Toad winds up in the Tower of London...
...After Basil Rathbone's neatly trimmed and waxed voice, Bing Crosby's narration of Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a letdown. The suspicion that Bing isn't taking the tale seriously is disquieting. The doings of schoolmaster Ichabod Crane are tailored to fit Crosby rather than Irving; that is probably why much of the charm of the first episode is missing in this one. There is enough left over to make good entertainment, though...
...capitalize on the "religious trend," the syndicates serialized the Peale and Sheen books, found readers still calling for more. Some papers, e.g., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, were planning to run one of the new columns in a top spot on Page One. Said Executive Editor Basil L. ("Stuffy") Walters of the Chicago Daily News last week: "People would have laughed you out of town if you had run that kind of stuff...