Word: fad
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...swing fad did, however, have more permanent effects than the Big Apple and the Suzie Q, in that it brought many people nearer a kind of music they hadn't understood before. The growth of popularity of improvised jazz, built around the individual self-expression of the musician, has been a direct result of the interest of people who looked behind the jump-jump and the jive, and the screeching horns and shimmying drummers, but it still has a long way to go. Writing in the Sunday Herald Tribune a couple of weeks ago, Benny Goodman hit the proverbial nail...
...Paris' famed Salon des Indépendents) offered artists with new ideas their one big chance. Many exhibitors at the early Independents shows later became famed figures in the U.S. art world. As the years went by, as modernism changed from a struggling revolutionary movement to a popular fad, the Society of Independents grew feebler. Last week's show, like many before it, caused hardly a critical ripple...
Following the present fad of humorizing homicide (Arsenic and Old Lace, Mr. and Mrs. North), Topper Returns puts the emphasis on nonsense. Some of it is just tiresome repetition of one of the cinema's pet tricks-an invisible person startling the other characters by smoking a cigaret, rowing a boat, opening a door. Some is fair comedy-Roland Young's befuddled resignation to a world of phantoms and foul play; the friendly insolence of Eddie Anderson (Radio Comic Jack Benny's radio butler, Rochester Van Jones). All of it is hokum, tried & true...
Since Snooperman strikes in unexpected places and without warning, officials fear no precautions can stop him. It is likely that his operations will become as widespread as the fish-swallowing fad of two years...
...companion piece at the Met is "Murder Over New York," in which a new Charlie Chan tangles with a sabotage gang. The new Charlie runs as strongly to proverbs as did his predecessor, Warner Oland, but the late, unlamented fad of "Confucius Say's" has removed most of the punch from Oriental witticisms...