Word: humdrum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Salinger must live in a world all his own. Sometimes it overlaps ours and we are lulled into a temporary sense of the humdrum. But this merely makes Salinger's twists of horror even more macabre...
Find a "New" Sound. When Miller has found a song for a singer, he calls in the musical arranger, looking for the best way to lift the tune out of the humdrum category. The first objectives: a "new" sound effect-e.g., reverberating echoes or the use of such unlikely instruments as braying French horns or a jangling harpsichord-and an insistent rhythm. To top off the arrangement, Miller asks for a full, rich sound. Sometimes this can be had by a clever distribution of instruments, sometimes it calls for a big orchestra and a massed chorus...
...unguarded moments, resembles Charlie Butterworth with a mustache. He might be the man the French lexicographers meant when they defined petit bourgeois in the dictionary-respectable, thrifty and discreet; at home with account books but uneasy with the great books; shrewd and commonsensical, and sometimes, underneath the humdrum exterior, imaginatively simple. He slipped into the premiership of France like a little-known guest emerging from behind the draperies into the babbling center of a Parisian literary salon...
...would-be assassin was Dov Shilanski, onetime inmate of Dachau concentration camp, later a member of the Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorist organization. When peace came to Israel, Shilanski became a terrorist without a target. He found a humdrum job as a clerk, slid out of sight for four years. Last spring, when the hard-pressed Jewish government sat down with the hated Germans to negotiate reparations, Shilanski took up his old tools and vowed to avenge the "betrayal...
Somebody Loves Me (Paramount) is a humdrum musical that strings 20 songs, including Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, On San Francisco Bay and Wang Wang Blues, on a story line "suggested" by the show-business careers of Husband & Wife Team Benny Fields and Blossom Seeley. According to the picture, popular Songstress Blossom (Betty Hutton) marries unknown Vaudevillian Benny (Ralph Meeker). But Benny resents being "Mr. Blossom Seeley," and insists on making good on his own before he does a duet with Blossom. With his wife's help, he finally makes the grade in the big time, and they...