Word: humor
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Director Alfred Hitchcock had a surprise in store for them when they got the wrappings off this Hitchcock picture. They found it was no Hitchcock but an authentic Laughton. Scarcely a shot in the whole picture revealed the famed British director's old mastery of cunning camera, sly humor, shrewd suspense. But Charles Laughton's impersonation of a Nero-like Cornish squire who is the paranoiac brain behind a gang of land pirates was magnificent in the eye-rolling, head-cocking, lip-pursing, massively mincing Laughton style...
Wells urges his favorite project of a new World Encyclopaedia or "World Brain," but his sense of humor bitterly tells him that even if endowed it might fall into the hands of Nicholas Murray Butler. "I am impatient and at the same time I do not know how to accelerate matters," says H. G. Wells. "I do not think this is simply a case of the distress of an old man in a hurry...
...after he hit Greeley, Buzz was an enterprising nobody. Then in 1934 he tied up with Greeley's KFKA, a radio station in somewhat the same situation. He caught ranchers at breakfast daily in seven States with three-quarters of an hour of weather, livestock & feed prices, good humor, a singing cowboy and a guitar-twanging cowgirl with Bar X names (Claude Redman, Esther Gibson), plenty of come-ons for the Greeley Cash Auction Market. He put his auction pit on the air twice a week, took microphones out on the range for farm sales, saw to it that...
...poets who became his friends were Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Robert Frost, William Rose Benét and his wife, Elinor Wylie. Advised Lindsay: "Base the serious side of your criticism of poetry with the tone of Abraham Lincoln as a touchstone, and the criticism of humor on the tone of Mark Twain. . . . We must have a humorous standard. Young writers. . . have been offered every kind of freedom by the critics but this-the freedom to laugh...
Despite its genuine humanity, its touches of humor and moments of drama, They Knew What They Wanted is sometimes awkward, fumbling, slow-moving; and the present production brings out the worst in it. Where the original company gave it the lift that a fine orchestra can give to a fairly good piece of music, the present company gives it the drubbing of a high-school band. Pathetic gags meant to reveal the simple natures of the characters are played for comedy lines. June Walker is a likable if unimpressive heroine, but Giuseppe Sterni's only virtue is his authentic...