Word: propped
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...months Russia seemed undecided about how to handle Brother Castro, as if hesitant to get too identified with his irrational words and his flopping economics. Now, it seems, the decision has been made to stand by him and prop...
...Cover) Grey skies hung over Moscow, but the mood of the Soviet capital was far from somber. Patriotic marches blared from public loudspeakers, and hundreds of thousands of people milled about in streets festooned with flowers, banners and miniature rocket models. An Ilyushin turbo prop airliner, escorted by seven MIG jet fighters, swooped low over the city and dipped its wings. Moments later, at Vnukovo Airport on the outskirts of Mos cow, the plane came to a stop before a 100-long red carpet stretched over the runway. Out stepped Russia's two newest cosmonauts, Major Andrian Nikolayev...
White businessmen, of course, view this difference as the prop on which their tranquility rests. They are assured of the support of most of Chestertown's Negro leaders, whose security still depends upon their approval. This is an increasingly tenuous sort of arrangement; yet for the past 15 years it has managed to satisfying the Negro community, providing it with unmistakable signs of material progress while masking the fact that Chestertown has not even begun to achieve actual integration...
With 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...
...high point of this production. The attendants are well blocked, and Basehart and Bosco mesh wonderfully. Their pacing and their subtle give-and-take are just right. And Basehart times his "Ay, no; no, ay" to perfection. This is a moving spectacle indeed. There remains only for the prop department to come up with a better hand-mirror than an allwooden imitation; the best actor in the world could not dash it to the floor with the glass "crack'd in a hundred shivers...