Word: foil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Captain Win Overholser and George McNair each won two in the epee, an event in which Bob Ditmar of Wesleyan swept his bouts. Sophomore Harry Ziel went undefeated in the saber for Rene Peroy's team. The Crimson won the foil, seven to two, the saber, five to four, and lost the epee, four to five...
...movie's awe of the Queen and her handsome surroundings proves an excellent foil for the incongruous invasion of Windsor Castle by a cockney ragamuffin (Andrew Ray), who absently spews a trail of plum pits as he wanders bug-eyed through the imposing halls and chambers. The picture also unbends enough to twit Victorian manners & morals...
Timeless Buffoon Durante had a superb foil in the Metropolitan Opera's strapping Wagnerian Soprano, Helen Traubel. From his first baffled exclamation at seeing her in Brünnhilde's armor ("Holy smoke, she's been drafted!"), through a passage from Die Walküre (in which Durante was a voiceless, baffled Siegmund), to his piteous attempts to pin a corsage on her coat of mail, Durante brilliantly played the role of a frustrated longhair...
...much welcoming applause as any of the cast. By now, 56-year-old Jack Benny's tightwad, pompous radio personality has become a U.S. institution, and the show's humor lies as much in his familiar character as in comic invention. As always, Benny played the foil for the acid comment of his wife, Mary Livingstone, the booming illiteracy of Bandleader Phil Harris, the naive malevolence of Singer Dennis Day, and the jaundiced animadversions of Eddie Anderson as Rochester, Benny's valet. There were indications that Benny was using his radio time...
...argued: "One may reasonably think it wiser in the long run to let an unhappy, bitter outcast vent his venom before any crowds he can muster . . . One may trust that his patent impotence will be a foil to anything he may propose. Indeed, it is a measure of the confidence of a society in its own stability that it suffers such fustian to go unchecked. [But] here we are faced with something very different"-i.e., the American Communists, who secretly conspire, conceal their membership, take orders from abroad...