Word: playe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...sweated and squirmed as he admitted that he had played the commodities game. But he tried to play the whole thing down. His "little transactions," he said, "were peanuts in the whole scheme of things . . . something less than $1,000,000." It was true that he had been operating in the grain and other markets while he was Harry Truman's ambassador on the Allied Reparations Commission and while Secretary Anderson had been his house guest in Hawaii last summer...
...brilliantly led Italian Communist Party stumbled? Partly because they had picked a phony strike issue. But principally because the Roman people drew upon their centuries-mellowed store of humor. They refused to play an audience role before a show that insulted their intelligence. They clambered into the wings, pulled the switches, snipped the ropes and brought the curtain tumbling on the Communist week of experiment...
...insurance company, a fortune-hunter, a hero. He was ruined by the Battle of Shiloh and again by postwar politics; ruined again by an attempt to organize a Mexican army. But after all his misfortunes, he wrote Ben-Hur which, both as a novel and as a play, and later as a movie, exercised a genuinely magnetic hold over the American imagination...
...earned Wallace only $300 in the first seven months. But nine years later, in 1889, 400,000 copies had been sold. In 1913, Sears Roebuck ordered a million copies. Just before the play was produced, Charles Frohman said to Producers Klaw & Erlanger: "Boys, I'm afraid you're up against it-the American public will never stand for Christ and a horse race in the same show." The play ran for 21 years...
...great scenes of the play-the dim, enormous interior of the Roman trireme, the wreck, and the struggles on machine-tossed waves, pale moonlight, the cataclysmic race, with two real chariots, each drawn by four Arabian horses, wheels rumbling and swaying, the incredible collision and Ben-Hur's triumph-all this excited and continued to excite the public...