Word: mountebanks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mencken, who cares for nobody, except for the laughs, the whole race looked satisfactorily scandalous. He described President Truman as a "shabby mountebank," Tom Dewey as a "limber trimmer," announced that Henry Wallace had manifestly lost "what little sense he had formerly, if indeed, he ever had any at all." He grudgingly admitted that Socialist Norman Thomas seemed to have some brains, but wrote him off immediately. He thought Dixiecrat J. Strom Thurmond was "the best of all the candidates," but with a final growl, he warned that "all the worst morons in the South...
Manuela (Judy Garland), engaged to a fat slob of a Caribbean mayor (Walter Slezak), is sure that a wandering mountebank (Gene Kelly) is the man of her daydreams, a pirate, legendary for dash and gallantry. Even when she learns that the actual pirate is the slob (retired), she sticks by the mountebank. When last seen, they're both clowning away to their hearts' content...
...Civil War. Hopping nimbly from region to region, Brooks lovingly sketches their literary manners-the rash of reform movements in New York, "attractional harmony and passional hygiene . . . water cure and Graham Bread"; the burly tall tales of the Far West where Joaquin Miller, "the greatest liar living . . . half a mountebank and all the time a showman," turned out crude, vigorous sketches of pioneer life; the sad whimsies of the post bellum South, where Constance Fenimore Woolson's "imagination lingered over the relics of the ancient South, the tumbledown battered houses and forlorn plantations...
Politics. The G.O.P. leaders also found time to plan a campaign against Democratic Senator Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo, the Mississippi mountebank (see PEOPLE). They had decided to challenge Bilbo's right to his Senate seat on the grounds that he incited whites to bar Negroes from the Mississippi polls in the Democratic primary...
Leading the latest procession from parlor to bedroom is the incomparable mountebank, Clifton Webb, gracefully balancing Noel's sheaf of tarts and darts. He hits the razor's edge with every gesture, shrug and intonation. Up against this kind of finesse Monty Wooley would be made to look like a blundering clod. Portraying the actor whose life aim begins and ends with his own convenience, Webb does a pungently sophisticated job of lechery and of molding the lives of the satellite circle of blustering men and urbane women who serve as his foils...