Word: prestons
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...film is as faithful as a slave to Meredith Willson's Broadway hit musical. Indeed, at one point a theater spotlight is used to light up the hero and his girl, with the rest of the screen in darkness. The hero is Professor Harold Hill (Robert Preston), a 1912 conman in the corn-belt town of River City, Iowa. Preston's tactic is to whip up enthusiasm in small towns for starting a brass band, sucker parents into buying the instruments and uniforms, and then skip out without teaching the young Sousaphiles a note. Preston is a musical...
...this spindle-thin plot, Music Man needs every available prop of period nostalgia, from Fourth of July fireworks to Wells Fargo wagons. The trouble is that the movie wobbles continually between sentiment, satire and satiety; one barbershop-quartet number is a treat; half a dozen are a trial. Robert Preston nonetheless puts enough showmanly sizzle into a revival-styled pitch called Trouble and the celebrated Seventy-Six Trombones to make at least part of the 2½ hours roll by like enchanted minutes. The Music Man is only funny by fidgets, but lip-curling Hermione Gingold, looking like Nero somewhat...
...Preston observes: "Much that you get in a science lecture could be gotten through mimeographed notes. In physics we have to aim at coverage of the whole structure of knowledge, and the lecture system is probably not the best way to do this. The textbooks have been worked over from edition to edition and can pretend to a greater completeness...
Material published for the first time in full and reliable texts includes Adams' defense of Captain Thomas Preston, one of the British soldiers who took part in the Boston Massacre...
Adams wrote later of his part in the trial: "The Part I took in Defense of Captn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most galant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I eyer rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the verdict of the Jury was exactly right...