Word: birde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hunting dogs and their weather-beaten owners and trainers, the center of the universe is the sleepy village of Grand Junction (pop. 750), Tenn. The National Field Trial Championship, World Series of U.S. bird-dog competition, has been held there for 52 years at Ames Plantation - a 27,000-acre expanse of quail-rustled sedge and woodland with a great ante-bellum mansion, rows of hospital-clean kennels and stables floored in handmade bricks...
Grand Junction, as a result, has developed the same hard-eyed passion for champion bird dogs which The Bronx reserves for baseball players. Last week, with the town jammed to the last spare room by the annual pilgrimage of top U.S. dog men, Grand Junction's waitresses, its housewives, its postmaster, and the room clerk at its lone hotel had a new canine hero-a small (46 Ibs.) but dashing pointer-named Shore's Brownie Doone...
Five days later Brownie was put down (i.e., released to run) again to demonstrate his ability to freeze into courteous immobility when the dog ahead made a point. The official consensus: "Beautiful." Five-year-old Brownie was crowned the top U.S. bird dog for 1950; Trainer Evans got $1,500 prize money; Owner Livingston received a suitably inscribed gold trophy -and Grand Junction went back to being a whistle stop for another twelve months...
...Bird Cage (by Arthur Laurents; produced by Walter Fried & Lars Norden-son) is a combination of all the formula tough-guy movies that a lot of people have been staying away from for years. The particular locale of The Bird, Cage is a gaudily sordid nightclub; the particular hard guy is the nightclub's boss. For the rest, Playwright Laurents invents nothing, improves nothing, omits nothing. He has successfully combed the market for a strand of perfectly matched cliches...
Though trickily performed on two stage levels, The Bird Cage is all written at one. It has the arid, conscienceless professionalism of the hack; yet it fails less from being no good than from being no fun. The villain has almost every aspect of villainy except its fascination, the play every ingredient of melodrama except its punch...