Word: clownishness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Tokyo, 3,380½ Miles Away. The characters are skillful percolations off men mentioned in Tregaskis' book-a clownish, kindly-hearted Brooklyn taxi driver (William Bendix), a smooth, hard sergeant (Lloyd Nolan), an ex-All-America chaplain (Preston Foster), a trigger-happy, brave child called Chicken (Richard Jaeckel). These men and others as simply characterized are put through 1) quiet days & nights of increasing apprehension; 2) the raid on a nearby village (Matanikau), from which only three returned (only one, in the film); 3) cleaning out the Japanese with grenades, gasoline and TNT; 4) the ferocious Japanese naval shelling...
...since the Tennessee monkey trial had there been such clownish witch-hunting as went on in Georgia last week. Cigar-chewing, red-suspendered Gene Talmadge ran amok through Georgia colleges, chasing furriners (i.e. non-Georgians) and Negro-befrienders. "There was a lynching in . . . the Capitol of Georgia Monday," said the Atlanta Journal, describing the ouster of Walter Dewey Cocking as dean of University of Georgia's College of Education (TIME, July 21). At week's end the Governor had knocked out two more important Georgia educators and provoked serious retaliation...
North Carolina's convivial, clownish Senator Robert Rice ("Our Bob") Reynolds, speaking against conscription, informed the Senate that "the squirrel hunters of North Carolina and Kentucky can keep Hitler or anyone else off until the Marines arrive and the situation is well in hand...
Congressional antics in election years are traditionally clownish. Many a sense-making, God-fearing Congressman goes more than somewhat screwy in a desperate effort to avert the biennial wrath of his constituency. But last week's two-ring Congressional circus was tops...