Word: cleverness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Threes & Eights. When Barbara Ann skates, she seems to float on ice. She turns effortlessly and unexpectedly-only clever performers can manage that-and never has to push to get up momentum for an eight or a loop-change-loop. She always seems to be enjoying herself, and as a result people always enjoy watching her. She has equilibrium, charm and style. A U.S. skating judge, who likes to define the quality of a skater in one word ("push" is his word for Sonja), puzzled over Barbara Ann a while, then described her quality as "femininity...
...chain reaction that led to such drollery started in 1876, when, according to the chroniclers, Ralph Curtis '76, "celebrated for his skill at caricature," Samuel Sherwood '76, "a clever draughtsman," and Arthur Sherwood '77, "the life of every party which he joined," put their moustaches together in a back room of Matthews Hall and founded "The Harvard Lampoon, or Cambridge Charivari Illustrated, Humorous, Etc." One of the earliest issues--a collector's item if that's your idea of a good time--carried, in addition to advertisements for "Silk Smoking Caps, Japanese" and "Brier-wood and Meershaum Pipes, Gambier Bowls...
...expects, in a Hitchcock movie, a few moments as shockingly vivid as a fire alarm. There are no such moments here. There are many clever little shots-in-the-arm that are unrelated to the story. Innumerable tricks of lighting and mood are moderately effective but irrelevant...
...last week's revival, instead of Blitzstein at a solitary piano, there was a white-tied Leonard Bernstein conducting a tiny orchestra. Bernstein did well by The Cradle's sometimes crude, sometimes clever music. But time had been less kind to The Cradle itself. It seemed more strident and less exciting; it had also become less topical. Its cockiness about labor- which had led it to treat the bosses with contemptuous laughter rather than bitter words-seemed early New Deal, not postwar. The Cradle's stagecraft, far from seeming daring, almost seemed dated. Only where Blitzstein...
...Clever, opium-puffing Producer Cocteau (his fans call him "the cleverest man alive") has allowed his pipe dreams only a soupcon of surrealist-Freudian flavor. The surreal touch is applied to several scenes with absolute poetic Tightness: by retarding to slow motion Beauty's terror-struck sprint through the Beast's castle, Cocteau conveys every decibel of the shriek she cannot release. There is also plenty of surreal wit: the Beast's eyes, ears, nose and fingernails fume when the fires of lust blaze up in him; and Beauty's tears turn to diamonds...