Word: belled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just how trying a dilemma the Helms case presented to Atty. Gen. Griffin B. Bell and company became apparent last week. Justice clumsily announced that the department had seen fit to work out a very special deal with the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As Helms and his renowned attorney Edward Bennett Williams walked into a federal district courtroom last Monday to file a nolo contendere plea to two misdemeanor counts against Helms for failing to testify fully before a Senate committee four years ago, Bell at that moment was informing President Carter of his "just...
...plot is par for the musical comedy course: Girl meets hunchback, hunchback falls in love, girl resists seduction by various poets and archdeacons, girl and hunchback meet in the bell-tower to live happily ever after. In between there are enough subplots and romantic interludes to keep the audience pleasantly amused, waiting for the bad guys and good guys to have it out in the final scene. So far so good. But Borowitz's manic idea somehow falters on the way to the cathedral, as the characters find themselves spouting an assortment of intolerable puns, weak jokes about SAT scores...
...tone of lunacy notably missing in the book, and infuses it with a bouncy, foot-tapping rhythm. Somehow, with an orchestra in the background, even the worst puns seem downright clever (even the heroine's tuneful realization of her love for Quasimodo--"Something 'Bout That Man That Rings a Bell"--is forgiveable). And for the big production numbers, Clarissa Bushman's slick choreography is good enough to keep even the most devoted Busby Berkely fan contented...
Attorney General Griffin Bell managed to shoehorn an energy pitch into a speech to the National Security Traders Association in Boca Raton, Fla. Speaking at the commissioning of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in Norfolk, Va., Defense Secretary Harold Brown found a way to deplore the fact that the nation "relies on overseas sources for half the oil we consume." On a swing through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano strayed from his talks on welfare problems to argue that the poor would suffer most if the Senate failed to approve Carter...
...quickly. Says he: "It's almost as if he were being photographed every 15 minutes to see if he's aging gracefully. He can't turn the economy around in ten months, and anybody who suggests he can is a damn fool." Donald Frey, chairman of Bell & Howell, who has considerable doubts about Carter's preachy moralism, nonetheless gives the President high marks on one subject: "On international economic issues, Carter is dead right. There is no ambiguity about where Carter, [Chief Trade Negotiator Robert] Strauss and Blumenthal stand. They are opposed to protectionism...