Word: crock
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...taken in years. The score: 8-6, 6-0, 6-4. The result, on the eve of the U.S.-Sweden zone finals, made good gamesman Hopman a likely candidate to go down in Gamesman history with such famed experts as Frith-Morteroy (master of the art of Countering the Crock), Edward Grice (specialist in the Secondary Hamper), and Stephen Potter himself (inventor of the Jack Rivers Opening). It also left the U.S. singles line-up just where it was a month...
...most unheroic hero of the year, is a failure to his fingertips, as teacher, husband and colleague. His heart is failing, too, forcing him to leave his job, to no one's regret. Stuffy and coldly embittered, he is derided by his pupils, who call him "The Crock"; patronized by the headmaster (Wilfrid Hyde White), who is ready to withhold his pension; cuckolded by a younger instructor (Nigel Patrick), who vaguely pities him; despised by his wife (Jean Kent), who is not only unfaithful but keeps him fully posted on her infidelities...
Then, in the humiliation of his last days at school, a simple act of kindness changes The Crock's life. A pupil (Brian Smith) astonishes him by presenting a parting gift, a copy of the Agamemnon in the Robert Browning translation. This gesture pierces The Crock's outer crust and strikes an emotional gusher. With the help of Rattigan's facile plotting, it leads to the wife's comeuppance at the hands of her lover and, finally, to a rebellious upsurge of self-respect in The Crock...
...movie improves on the play by widening its view of the school's life and atmosphere and enabling Rattigan to dramatize incidents that the stage cramped him into reporting at secondhand. Such minor characterizations as The Crock's young replacement (Ronald Howard, son of the late Leslie Howard), Actor Smith's sympathetic pupil and Actor Hyde White's hypocritical headmaster seem fuller than before, and are skillfully played. Most to its credit, the film gets up close to a superb piece of acting by Michael Redgrave, who makes the schoolmaster's inner suffering as vivid...
Chasing Crapshooters. There were others besides Lucky Luciano who had always thought Estes Kefauver's investigation was a crock of baloney. Fellow Democrats had viewed with some skepticism the first moves of the earnest, energetic do-gooding Senator from Tennessee. No trained investigator, he is a 47-year-old lawyer (Yale '27), a liberal Southerner who opposed filibusters on principle and advocated Atlantic Union, an industrious student who has written a book on modernizing Congress, a reformer whose chief accomplishment as a politician was his defeat of Memphis' Boss Ed Crump in getting himself elected...