Word: lilt
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Still, there are some pleasant things here too. Some of the scenes have a Lili-like lilt. One of the ballets, in which Michael gives Leslie a cooking lesson in the palace kitchen, is a sightly romp. The color is fresh and bright. Cinderella's dress for the ball is wonderful-the skirt looks like a frilly igloo* -and Leslie wears it as a princess should. And when all else fails, there is Keenan Wynn. As somebody called Kovin, a confidant of the prince, poor Keenan has practically nothing to do all through the picture except to stride...
...remarked, "is like a fine glass. It only rings true when it's absolutely empty." By this standard, Three for the Show is a good musical-the best so far released in 1955. It has the inimitable zing of vacuity, and it has something more important: a fundamental lilt that travels from scene to scene and makes the picture musical even when the sound track is silent...
...lilt gets a lift from the story, a merry little jape that was cribbed from a 1940 movie, a comedy called Too Many Husbands, which in turn was borrowed from a comedy by Somerset Maugham, who had lifted the theme from a gloomy narrative poem by Tennyson, who had got the idea from a sculptor friend who heard the tale told in Suffolk...
Though they bear the mark of the poet's workbench, with words missing or a choice of words still undecided-as, for instance, between decay and worn away-most of the poems nonetheless lilt their way through the favorite Housman themes of love, war, death, courage, the transient beauty of life and the ironies of loving and leaving it. As ever, Housman is chiefly the laureate of youth. (Critic Cyril Connolly once pointed out that in 63 poems, Housman used the word "lad" 67 times.) If few of the lines from the Manuscript are memorable, they are all refreshingly...
Muttered Peter uneasily: "We have no money at all." Japan's Emperor Hirohito greeted the New Year with his traditional annual poem, which as usual had the lilt wrung out of it in translation. The royal quat rain: "Stout are the hearts/Of men who toil/At their honest calling/Enduring heat and cold." Cinemactress Ava Gardner, a restless siren who has spent the past month roving the world and attending national premieres of her latest movie, The Barefoot Contessa, popped up in Stockholm. She wore shoes to a party in her honor, pursed her moist lips prettily to get a kiss...