Word: extravaganza
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...TIME, June 23) they feted her, showered her with gifts and, as a grand climax, pinned upon her well-rounded bosom the Grand Cross of Isabella la Católica. Eva loved it. The promise of Franco's bauble had spurred her trip. The other reasons for the extravaganza were not so clear. But at least Argentina was advertised, and Eva meanwhile had a wonderful time as she flashed her dazzling smile at ambassadors, cooed at crowds, fondled babies, and impulsively pressed 100-peseta notes into the hands of tearful, nursing mothers...
...years after its original release Samuel Goldwyn's personal prize package looks pretty much the same: it is still elegant extravaganza bursting with top-flight specialty entertainment. The film has a superstructure of Gershwin music (last score before the composer's death); it has as well the minty savor of screen spectacles in the Thirties which sticky current jobs somehow cannot boast...
When an almost oppressively sophisticated writer turns out so highfalutin a play, there may well be method, even if there is no meaning, in his claptrap. Very possibly Cocteau meant to polish up a lot of passe heroics into a rococo extravaganza that would be lively theater to boot. And very possibly The Eagle Has Two Heads is full of brilliant rhetoric, in French. But on Broadway it is just a grimly gaudy bore. Nor, for all her fire and force, can Actress Bankhead act it the one way that might be effective-with high artifice, in the immensely grand...
...jumbled maze of Freshman life comes, once a year, a floating weekend of joy--the Jubilee. However grim the winter, spring must come at last, and traditional accompaniment for robins, seersucker jackets, and young fancies is the giant Yardling extravaganza...
Producer David O. Selznick, whose outdoors extravaganza, Duel in the Sun, had shocked moralists of several faiths, tinkered busily here & there, finally won from the Catholic Legion of Decency a "B" rating-meaning that the picture is now considered bad only in spots. Number of spots pared out: 46. But the costly, sure-fire Duel, Selznick assured the world, was practically as long as ever, and "its dramatic values and integrity have not suffered in the least...