Word: hippopotami
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...shamelessly obvious, more often Porter is so dazzlingly dexterous that all the Tin Pan Alleycats bristle with awe. Nobody is cozier with words: for him, Winchell rhymes with provincial, suburban with Deanna Durbin, Nina with schizophrenia. Jehovah with Casanova, Lassie with democrassy, to the bottom I with hippopotami, a fine finnan haddie with my heart belongs to daddy, and Venetia who loved to chat so is still drinkin' in her stinkin' pink palazzo. There are images and characters in Porter that stick in the mind because of their authentic, ginny bitterness: the lovers whose cars are seen...
...bullocks or camels, trekking across dunes and marshes, to 2,000 polling booths, where the magic papers lay. Six of Sudan's eight millions are Northerners, who worship Allah but still practice female circumcision; the rest are Southern primitives, who worship bulls, wear no clothes and hunt hippopotami in the swamps of the White Nile. There are Moslems and pagans, Dinkas, Bongos, Niam-Niams and Fuzzy-Wuzzies, but last week all confronted a new experience that most had never heard of and very few understood. The experience was democracy...
...them only to sneak in one colossal scene after another. Thick and fast they come: Gregory Peck by the Seine, Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner at the bullfights and in the Spanish civil war, Gregory Peck and Hildegarde Neff splashing about the Riviera, Gregory Peck, friendly natives, and several hippopotami in an African river. All this is interpolated into a clinical, wince-by-wince history of the progress of Peck's gangrene. By the time things really look black for Peck, one has only the impression that if he was really so unhappy doing all these things, he deserves...
...acting honors are easily captured by a herd of hippopotami plunging like dolphins in an African river, and by a Hollywood hyena whose night prowling about the camp has a superbly eerie quality. Among the Hollywood cast, Ava Gardner is surprisingly effective in the early scenes in Paris. Screen Writer Casey Robinson describes the script as "one-third Hemingway, one-third Zanuck and one-third myself"-a dilution of talent that probably accounts for the pat, happy ending, the atmosphere of whining self-pity, and the resolute backing away from any issues except sugar-coated love...
...about 99 percent of the people--cannot understand that it takes a good Big Ten team to crush a good Coast team. A poor one cannot do it, especially on the Coast. Washington made the huge Minnesota line (average weight from end to end: 215 pounds) look like hippopotami in quicksand, while an excellent runner named Hugh McElhenny ran rings around a green defensive backfield...