Word: dumbed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Elegance of Line. The play-within-a-play is handled with high elegance and tension, in sinister dumb show, accompanied by the snarling archaic charm of the music William Walton composed for the occasion. The camera, always holding the mimes at distant center, steals in a lordly semicircle past the enormous heads of the guilty, the guileless, and the pitilessly watchful; and rising whispers, like leaves in a storm-foreboding wind, underline the shock and horror of this deadly piece of court satire. From there on, the film arches in unbroken grandeur and intensity...
...business, looked out for Number One, and found it surprisingly profitable. It was, by & large, a time of easy earning and free spending. We did not know then, as we do now, that in a time of rising prices, of inflating values, you really have to be very dumb indeed to fail to make money . . . Each man took care of himself, but the sum total of all this self-reliance was that the devil not only took the hindmost but the foremost and those in between...
...Christian Democrats, confident of victory, found other portents. In Formia, near Naples, plump, moist-eyed Elvira Wangrillo told how a Communist had joined a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Itri where, confronted with the picture of the Madonna, he fell to his knees, struck dumb. "He has been that way ever since," related Elvira, "the doctors say it's a miracle...
...years now, the "poison" of Arturo Toscanini has been seeping out into the world. Drugged by it, millions of music lovers (and not a few critics) have come to regard all of the Maestro's music with dumb and unquestioning adoration. Certainly he has brought the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Verdi to life as no other man has. He is now a white-haired little man of 81, and when a human being reaches that age, his critics, remembering his finer hours, are apt to temper their judgments with mercy...
...indictment of the book business, The Gilded Hearse is neither good burlesque nor significant exposure. Few readers will be surprised to learn that book salesmen often haven't read the books they sell, that salesgirls in bookstores are often dumb, that book publishers are increasingly less concerned with literature than with bestsellers. Those with the kind of taste that Gorham deplores will be quickest to see that The Gilded Hearse is just superficial enough, spiced with just enough bedroom business, to make it a likely Hutchinson book...