Word: dullnesses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...vital, high caliber gags to carry it over the inevitable slow spots. It bogs and badly after starting off at a tremendous clip. The middle reels, where any normally intelligent gagman would be clearing the decks for a final smashing boffola, are gummed up by a miserably dull jail routine that talks the audience straight into dreamland. And they sleep right on through to the bitter end. Cary Grant stars opposite Hepburn and is charming and funny as always. Katherine Hepburn has sinus trouble...
...points via answers to questions he threw at students chosen from his little list. This system forced the students to keep up with their work, which bothered many of them. The real trouble with the method, however, is that it makes students listen to each other, which is always dull, when they could be listening to Professor Miller, which is often fascinating and--this I judge by two other courses I have taken with him--sometimes inspiring...
Deliberately Dull? Journalist Ivor Brown thinks there is something to be said for the "odd appetite for knowledge in our times, an appetite which radio [through quiz shows] stimulates and feeds." With relief and some surprise he notes that radio, "instead of flattening out all our accents and idioms, and reducing the rich variety of our national speech . . . has actually popularized diversity." Even "American and Canadian voices seem to have especial powers of coaxing one to listen and to like what one hears...
...fact that it has "ended isolation. A sense of loneliness, of inhabiting an alien universe ... is the commonest cause of personal misery. It is now being lifted." BBC's often-criticized newscasts, she thinks, are not so bad: "Americans, of course, constantly assail our news service as dull. It is meant, in a sense, to be dull. Anyone who wants it ... lively should listen for a spell to [American] news commentators and 'analysts,' each striving to be more arresting, more dramatic, more charged with a sense of crisis than the other...
Time was when the proceedings of anything calling itself the World Congress of Intellectuals would have been dignified and deadly dull. Last week, however, when such a congress met in Poland's Wroclaw (formerly Germany's Breslau), the spectators could not decide which ring of the circus to watch...