Word: familiar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...view, while arresting, is often somewhat unsatisfying. "The practice of coitus," declares Jones, "was familiar to me at the ages of six and seven, after which I suspended it and did not resume it till I was 24." This startling statement he leaves unexplained. No less tantalizing is his claim to inside knowledge of why British General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon and his besieged garrison were overwhelmed at Khartoum in 1885: "All the high endeavour . . . miscarried through the petty episode of Lord Charles Beresford's developing a boil on the bottom at the critical moment." At this critical moment...
There was none of the improvised Dixieland so familiar to festivals; nor were there many personal appearances by such great solo showmen as "Satchmo" Armstrong or Gene Krupa. Instead, classics-minded young jazzmen concentrated on the brassy new progressive jazz and the slightly atonal West Coast styles, and played their well-rehearsed arrangements with the cool elegance of conservatory students. Even Stan Kenton's 18-piece (including bongo drums) orchestra had its own smooth brand of progressive beat. But the real stars of the festival were the small, intimate combos that played jazz with a new maturity and subtlety...
...Lola Lola, the hardhearted Lorelei whose siren song lures a respectable, middle-aging botany teacher (Curt Jurgens) into degradation, Swedish Actress Britt makes a stunning physical impression. She slithers among the cabaret chairs like an insolent incarnation of sin, and despite her tone-deafness, delivers the familiar Falling in Love Again and a new song, Lola Lola ("lives for love"), with throaty seductiveness. But she is never called upon to display even a modest range of emotion, never conveys anything of the sense of mystery and veiled secret that underlay Marlene's tough tart...
...exchange of prisoners, he returned with the U.S. troops who dashed into Manila to rescue his P.W. friends, he realized afresh how moving was man's capacity for hope and how strong was man's capacity for life. Man's will to live was a familiar story to Mydans: in 1940 a shrieking, clawing Chinese woman in Chungking had begged for money as she held aloft her dead infant, waving it by one foot, "like a butcher with a plucked chicken." Mydans gave her some money, and later that night, belly tight with food, Mydans came shamefully...
...fool-father truly stupid enough to be gulled by his ugly daughters, Regan and Goneril. Then, as the king wandered mad through the storm, deserted by his daughters, the performance departed the norm again. Laughton's king was strangely calm and compelling. Rarely was he moved to the familiar, passion-torn shrieks of other Lears. His fantastic monologues with himself sounded almost conversational: "Let the great Gods, that keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads, find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch...