Word: besting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Passport to Pimlico. The British at their comic best, spoofing nationalism, bureaucracy and themselves (TIME...
Coalmen everywhere were finding business harder & harder to hold on to. This was due to: 1) Lewis, whom coalmen call "the best oil salesman in the country"; 2) the greater efficiencies and cleanliness of oil and natural gas; 3) the rise in coal prices and drop in oil prices, which has put oil on a competitive footing with coal. On the East Coast alone switchovers from coal to oil have cut this year's coal sales at least 20% below...
...with motivations, added characters, threw in some dancing girls. Major change: Delilah became the younger sister of the nameless Philistine woman who was the Biblical Samson's wife. The final adaptation skillfully manages to achieve the most serviceability for the screen with the least violence to Scripture. Its best job is to create conviction in Samson's feats: e.g., his slaughter with the jawbone of an ass looks plausible because the script places him tactically in a narrow defile where he can take on the Philistines a few at a time...
...heifer, you would not have answered my riddle"). But most of it is Biblical ersatz with an Edgar Rice Burroughs flavor ("You will bring death to the village. Samson is our warrior"). And sometimes it lapses into pure Hollywood (Samson to his mother: "Ummm, you're the best cook in Zorah, little mother"). A dialogic highpoint of some kind is reached when Samson, handed a javelin to do battle with the lion, cheerily assures Delilah: "I won't need it. He's a young lion...
...Army came and so did the best thing that ever happened to the division: a long rest in Australia, where people get false teeth early. Australian girls couldn't believe the marines' molars were their own. "Finally, this babe with me reached over," said one marine, "and took hold of my teeth and tried to yank 'em and I let her. She was sure surprised when nothing gave." Before the division left Melbourne most of the men "were in some stage of a serious love affair with an Australian girl...