Word: circusing
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...result of the weather was London's quietest New Year's Eve in recent memory. Only a few hardy souls gathered in Piccadilly Circus for the traditional singing of Auld Lang Syne. There were 162 arrests, mostly for throwing snowballs at policemen. A Daily Herald columnist discovered another social effect of the snow blitz. In mock horror, he reported that "five total strangers talked to me in the blizzard on the station platform...
...doing anything scandalous." He pronounced himself embarrassed at being addressed as "Holiness" or "Holy Father.'' and admitted that he could not get used to thinking of himself in the plural. "Don't interrupt me?I mean us!" he once joked. He even granted a papal audience to a traveling circus, and fondly patted a lion cub named Dolly. "You must behave here," ordered John. "We are used only to the calm lion of St. Mark...
...confidence. Last week at Philharmonic Hall, he led a Beethoven Fifth Symphony in which fate really did seem to knock at the door; under Maazel. the horns spoke high German, and the double basses, which before had hidden shyly in the hall's odd acoustics, danced like circus elephants. Maazel had made an impressive return...
Onscreen as onstage, not the least of Jumbo's pleasures is its plot, shamelessly snookered from Shakespeare. Romeo (Stephen Boyd) is a daring young man on a flying trapeze. Juliet (Doris Day) is a bareback rider. A cruel fate divides them. His father (Dean Jagger) owns a circus, her father (Jimmy Durante) owns a circus-and the circuses are rivals. Romeo, sent incognito to swindle Juliet's father, falls in love with the lass instead. Duty at first conquers love, but in the end schmalz conquers...
Director Charles Walters has the sense to let all this seem exactly what it is: nonsense. He skillfully mingles cinemagic and circus-pocus, and he almost always gets the best out of his players-including Jumbo, portrayed with massive aplomb by an animal named Sydney, who wears a size 92 top hat and, in profile, looks rather like Durante. Day as usual is blindingly sunny, but in a circus the glare seems suitable. Boyd, for once, talks without sounding as if he were a species of Boyd that chews worms. And Martha Raye is hilarious as an unfortunate fortuneteller...