Word: charmers
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Cinema Stock Company. Technically, Bergman is a master of his trade. He drifts about the studio with a faraway gaze in his eyes-"He looks like a snake charmer, a conjurer"-but he sees everything. He drives his technicians hard, demands and gets unquestioning loyalty from his actors. Most of them are prominent players on the Swedish stage; yet year after year they take parts in Bergman's pictures, even though it means giving up summer vacations, even though the parts are sometimes small and the pay unexciting...
...English is his most beloved enemy, but Waterloo is not in his capricious vocabulary, and as the stars with which he decorates his name on the blackboard testify, his ego is still imperial. He attacks sense and syntax with the same insouciance that originally made him such a verbal charmer. To Hyman Kaplan, the discoverer of the laws of gravity is "Isaac Newman,'' the plural of blouse is "blice'' and the opposite of nightmare is "daymare...
...Girl. David Niven tries some motivational research on Shirley Mac Laine, a Raggedy Antic charmer...
...Snake Charmer. The man who stands between Iraq and all-out Communism is a lean, hard-muscled and ascetic professional soldier with a fixed, snaggle-toothed smile. His name Abdul Karim Kassem. On the face of it, Karim Kassem, 44, seems a weak reed on which to rest the free world's hopes. Modest in deportment, moderate in conversation, Kassem is nonetheless inordinately and naively suspicious. (He recently asserted that one section of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad lured Iraqis in with stories that automobiles can be bought there-and then filled them with anti-Kassem talk.) Cursed...
...Baghdad, the son of a lower-middle-class family, Kassem graduated from the Royal Military College in 1934, fought with distinction in the Palestine war, and over the years won regular promotions. At senior officers' school at Devizes in southwestern England, his classmates nicknamed him "the snake charmer" because of his ability to argue them into undertaking improbable courses of action in field problems. (He once got the members of his team to send hypothetical tanks off to the left flank, though everyone knew that this routed them through a deep swamp.) A British officer-instructor, less impressed with...