Word: charm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Each weekday, from early morning until sunset, television turns loose an avalanche of masculine charm that would overwhelm any audience less hardy than U.S. housewives. TV's charm boys range from such veteran network stars as Arthur Godfrey to such local Lotharios as The Continental, who lounges about in a silken robe, sipping champagne at midday, breathing love poems and casting hot-eyed glances calculated to burn right through TV screens...
...varying degrees, most of the other charm boys pattern themselves after Godfrey. His most faithful imitator (and occasional stand-in for Godfrey) is CBS's Robert Q. Lewis, 32, a slick-haired man who wears sharp suits and horn-rimmed glasses. His cast, like Godfrey's, sits at one side of the stage. In the Godfrey manner, Lewis chuckles interminably at his own gags, and talks heedlessly until he is cut off the air by the station break. But Robert Q. is not too proud to imitate other stars. A day after Charm Boy Garry Moore...
...charm boys labor hard to achieve a mysterious TV ingredient known in the trade as "sincerity." Crew-cut Garry Moore gets his by half-closing his right eye and crossing his fists in front of his chest; for emphasis he uses the waggling forefinger and the forward head bob. Du Mont's Paul Dixon strikes the folksy note by chewing gum, rubbing his nose and garbling his syntax. Bob Crosby is a hands-in-pockets man, but he also shoots his eyebrows, ducks his head winningly and rocks on heel and toe. His cast struggles to be homespun...
There is some indication that the nation's housewives have had just about enough TV daytime charm. 'Only CBS's Godfrey and NBC's Tommy Bartlett are in the current Nielsen list of Top Ten daytime shows; Art Linkletter and Garry Moore have not quite made it, and all the others are far down in the ratings. But TVmen are persistent. ABC announced that Veteran Charm Boy Don McNeill will bring his Breakfast Club back to TV for a second try at providing "clean, tainment sparkling, every weekday heart-warming fun morning...
...Rico in Little Caesar, Robinson's character is less fragrant. But he is not devoid of a certain fatuous charm: his sentimental inability to knock off a stool pegeon of long acquaintance proves his undoing, thus leaving us a foul moral lesson that somehow cluded the censors...