Word: screens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...house is a machine for living") tries to be functional, but only succeeds in destroying privacy. "The 'living area' becomes an echoing cavern reverberating with every sound from children's yelling to the vacuum cleaner's whine. The open serving hatch [becomes] a television screen, showing a disheveled would-be functionalist trying to cope with a multiplicity of electric contrivances that report their broccoli and onions way beyond their allotted zone." The dining room "where families and friends got to know each other is now ... a counter behind which parents and soda jerks are indistinguishable...
...Banana (Harry Popkin; United Artists) brings Comedian Phil Silvers to the screen in a literal photograph of his long-running Broadway burlesque of burlesque. The sad truth seems to be that burlesque is a delicate flower: it needs a little dirt to grow in, but the censors, in this case, have carted away what little there was. Nonetheless, Comedian Silvers manures his garden energetically with the few faintly smelly old stories he has left (She: "I'd do anything to get into television." He: "It's not that easy...
...understand the screenwriters' efforts to scrape the tarnish from poor Launcelot's soul. And it is clear that they had to pare down the number of characters wandering through the story to keep within the limits of the CinemaScope screen. But when only a lean-faced Mel Ferrer, a sullen Ava Gardner, and a Frank Merriwellish Robert Taylor remain, disappointment tends to creep in. All that keeps the audience from leaving their seats are the colorful sword-swinging battle scenes between regiments of Round Table rivals and the single-handed heroics of Robert Taylor's Launcelot...
Folksy & Sincere. Godfrey, of course, is the unquestioned king of TV's matinee idols. Last week, telecasting from Florida, he sat on a Miami beach with the Atlantic rollers surging behind him, while his cast shivered in Manhattan. Using the split-screen technique, Godfrey chatted with each member of his team and listened approvingly while they told him how wonderful he was. Arthur operates on the disarming assumption that every viewer is at least as absorbed in Godfrey as he is, and he spends much of his 90-minute show in discussing such items as his own weight, what...
...feel themselves living again in an age of fable, charm-changed into people far away and long ago. Watching them, an adult audience is soon lost in the misty mood of high romance, and children, for whom the picture is perhaps principally intended, will probably be roaring at the screen like wild little Picts...