Word: beanstalking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their best, Lloyd's gags have the simplicity and spontaneity of growing grass. They emerge almost imperceptibly from next to nothing and a moment later become a blooming hayfield of blundering frustrations. At their wildest they have the towering improbability of Jack's beanstalk. His props are the natural pitfalls of daily life. His situations spring from the normal embarrassments of a small-town boy, abnormally innocent and awkward, but gifted with a brash, penultimate courage which always brings...
...conservation has taken deep root in the South. Farmers plant less land to cotton, more to grass and legumes. They terrace their steeper fields skillfully, plow on the contour instead of up & down hill. On thousands of once sterile slopes, the miraculous vine, kudzu, clambers like Jack's beanstalk. It chokes devouring gullies with entangled soil. It buries fences, leaps into trees. Its big leaves, which stay green until Christmas, are as nourishing to cattle as excellent alfalfa. When plowed under, kudzu enriches the soil...
...Friendship Train (TIME, Nov. 17) rolled on last week, its chain of boxcars lengthening like a giant beanstalk. It rumbled down the eastern slope of the Great Divide and over Midwestern plains. At city and whistle stop alike, additional cars bulging with food were hitched up. At week's end, the train had 207 cars, and it had still not reached New York, where a huge end-of-the-line contribution for Europe's hungry was already waiting...
...Bongo winds up his slapping all too soon. As the Northwoods twilight sends Bonge packing, the last gleam of comedy also dies, and the remainder of the picture is unbearable--in both senses. Edgar Bergen spins a new version of Jack and the Beanstalk, but while the beanstalk flourishes nicely, Bergen's tale doesn't. The reason why Bongo was cut short probably stems from Hollywood's fronetic fear of Communists; but it seems too bad that the witch-hunt has finally extended to make-believe hears...
...second half of the picture, Edgar Bergen and dummies, in Technicolor, tell a little girl (Luana Patten) a cartooned variant of the Jack & the Beanstalk story. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Goofy, after a first-rate sequence as starving peasants, are lifted into the sky by a magic plant. There they meet Willie the Giant, outwit him (no hard job), and rescue a captive heroine...