Word: capra
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Science Foundation, the M.I.T. program is the most ambitious ever undertaken to modernize high-school physical science courses. Its steering committee includes such names as Nobel Prizewinners Edward Purcell and I. I. (for Isidor Isaac) Rabi, M.I.T.'s President James Killian, Atomic Scientist Vannevar Bush and Moviemaker Frank Capra; its working staff already numbers more than 100. Under Director Jerrold Zacharias, head of M.I.T.'s nuclear science laboratory, the staff will work at least five years on the project, after that may turn its attention to high-school chemistry...
Hemo the Magnificent, presented by the Bell Telephone System on CBS, was a costly monument to the low opinion that some broadcasters hold of the U.S. viewer's intelligence. Written and directed by Frank Capra as the second in a special science series (the first: Our Mr. Sun), the film told the story of the blood and how it gets around. It was doubly condescending in assuming that 1) viewers must be approached at the grade-school level to woo their interest in science, and 2) the circulatory system is so intrinsically dull that it takes...
...patronizing vulgarity with which Capra jazzed up the lesson threw a blight on scientific footage that, in itself, was as good as anything of its kind ever televised. Especially effective in color, these sequences showed a pounding human heart, the hearts of a turtle, a rabbit and a bird, and the passage of blood, a corpuscle at a time, through the microphoto-graphed capillaries of live animals. But as the price of admission, the audience had to face a tasteless jangle of gimmicks: a Superman-like "Hemo" to personify blood, dialect comedy, crude mechanical cartoon analogies of circulatory functions ("groceries...
Grand Scheme. The high sheen on Sun was due largely to one man, Hollywood's Oscar-winning Producer-Director Frank Capra, 58, who spent four years making the show. "It was a labor of love," he says. "I just wanted to prove science could be diverting." To Italian-born Showman Capra, a chemical-engineering graduate of Cal Tech, Mr. Sun is no documentary but "a show, with accurate physical facts-a fresh attempt to glamorize science." So are his three upcoming TV ventures for Bell: Hemo, The Magnificent, the story of blood and circulation; The Strange Case...
...version has lost the social point of the old, along with other things. Dick Powell is at the megaphone, rather than Capra, and he uses the instrument less as a director should than as he did when he was a baby-faced crooner-to make things loud and corny. Further, the script has been thumbsily rewritten by Claude Binyon, and many of the sly little scenes have been converted into thwacking big musical numbers, set to some remarkably unmusical music. Both of the big names have been replaced by other big names (June Allyson and Jack Lemmon...