Word: motif
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Jazz Age is more stirringly nostalgic than its sound track. Arranger Robert Russell Bennett has woven together 18 songs, e.g., Dardanella, Chicago, Yes Sir, That's My Baby, in the orchestral style of the period, and orchestrated Hallelujah with the clack of a stock ticker as its motif. The narration of the film, the second in a Project 20 trilogy (first: The Great War; third: The Story of the Thirties), is redolent with the decade's slangy idiom, from "Let's get blotto" to "Nerts." Better yet, not only for its authentic ring but for its unforeseen...
...artist. There are other opportunities in this exhibition to follow the development of an idea by the artist. Patterson, for example which begins like one of the bleak building fronts in Shahn's earlier work slowly evolves into a picture of color and perspective to which an ironic frieze motif along the top of the building has been added...
Tyrone Power plays Eddy with unflagging boyishness, and Kim Novak acts the doomed Marjorie Oelrichs with spectral intimations ("Hold me, Eddy; I'm afraid of the wind . . ."). This blowy motif runs throughout the film: death's advent is always heralded by wind-driven snow, rain or autumn leaves. A stately newcomer, Australia's Victoria Shaw, is introduced as Duchin's second wife, and a pair of clipped-accented moppets (Mickey Maga and Rex Thompson) perform as the Duchin child at different ages. Moviegoers may enjoy the rippling piano notes (actually played by Carmen Cavallaro) that made...
Party orators were out in corps force; they included nearly all the Cabinet, many of the White House staffers, more than a score of Republican governors, Senators and Representatives. The motif was partisan right down to the "First Lady Salad" in Spokane and the "Fresh Asparagus Spears Nixon" in Cleveland. There were the inevitable bloopers: in New York's dingy Madison Square Garden a television screen went blank just as the President began speaking, came brightly back just as he finished. There was evidence of ward-level tricksters at work: the Los Angeles dinner committee, dominated by Nixon supporters...
Mann's familiar style supports his efforts as well as ever. There is the firm German repetition of motif. We are constantly reminded of Krull's nakedness and his false drapery of forms and decorum. His costumes--which bolstered his youthful fancies--become foreign tongues and social manners. His adaptability constantly recurs so that we even expect him to talk like a paleontologist within minutes after meeting...