Word: lowdownness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nothing new about Lunatics and Lovers itself. The scene is a farce-hallowed Broadway hotel suite sprinkled with hotel sweeties. People constantly enter and exit, there are confabs and wisecracks, phone calls and flunkeys and cops. Some of the characters are crooked, others are crocked; the talk is extremely lowdown, and the lust unbounded. Nothing could be socially less conventional or theatrically more...
...secretly, now pursing his lips, ticking off the tempo with one brown suede shoe. When Desmond is through, Brubeck picks up the last idea and toys with it. He ripples along for a while in running melodic notes, builds up a sweet and lyrical strain, noodles it into a lowdown mood, adds a contrapuntal voice, suddenly lashes into a dissonant mirror-inversion, then subsides into a completely disconnected rhythm that momentarily garbles the beat. The listeners lose all contact with the original tune, but they can dimly perceive other things: a favorite forgotten song, a hymn, a twinge of sadness...
Black Widow (20th Century-Fox), based on a whodunit by Patrick Quentin, is really just a routine man hunt through Manhattan. However, Scripter-Director-Producer Nunnally Johnson takes the opportunity to give the customers some uptown lowdown, and he dishes it out with chill skill...
...with the title song; Zorina, in the part she played in London 17 years ago, still has grace and charm; Bobby Van, in Ray Bolger's old role, has much of the master's ease and dexterity; Elaine Stritch stops the show with an aggressively lowdown warbling of an added song, You Took Advantage of Me. But for notable stretches there is torpor on 46th Street...
...borrows in all directions: from countless quiz shows, from Bride & Groom, from This Is Your Life. Frenetic Bert Parks tries to make all these elements stick together by bringing onstage a devoted couple and then surrounding them with assorted friends and relatives who give the lowdown on the romance and answer quiz questions to help pile up loot for the lovebirds...