Word: machina
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Deus ex Machina. His wartime success got Jack a job in Hollywood shortly after he came home. RKO and later 20th Century-Fox put him under contract but rarely got around to putting him in front of a camera (he did once play opposite an unheard-of starlet named Marilyn Monroe). In 1947 he was hired as the summer replacement on NBC-Radio's Jack Benny Show. His fresh, natural style was a success, and in the fall American Tobacco put the Jack Paar Show on the air on ABC. It lasted until Christmas Eve. In his radio days...
...rabbit symbol plays a "deus ex machina" role similar to the oracles in Oedipus Rex and the Witches in Macbeth. And it is no injustice to mention Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Thurber in the same breath. They differ in modes of presentation, but not in depth of content...
...team whose main target is the twisting mountain road along which all vehicles, including his own and the pursuing Japanese, must travel. The road is an undulating mass of Chinese refugees moving in grim lockstep with fear, famine and misery. In their eyes, the Americans are the dei ex machina shielded from fatality by the jeep, the SCR-300 radio and the K-ration...
...whether his opponent is an amorous Persian princess, a champion wrestler, an enraged hull or the royal executioner. Finally they win through to Ethiopia, but arrive as prisoners of war scheduled to be sacrificed to the sun god. It needs one more superhuman effort by old reliable deus ex machina before Charicleia can claim her birthright and live happily ever after...
...miss its point; and this last issue suggests that brash confidence and imagination needn't be limited to scientific work. "When we can seriously entertain the thought of flying to the moon or any other bit of scientific surrealism, why do we bring up that deus ex machina 'impossible. . .necessity' to limit the possibility of living imaginitively...