Word: shapelessness
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Aside from its big scene, however, Inherit the Wind loses from being more documentary than creative. It is too journalistic in tone, too diffuse and shapeless in movement. Under Director Herman Shumlin's able supervision, there are plenty of vivid snapshots and plenty of lively moments, but the play provides no sustained drama. And what does seem fictional seems all too much so: a vapid love story between Scopes and a hard-shell preacher's daughter; a Mencken who talks more like a smarty-pants cribbing from the real Mencken's prose. But if Inherit the Wind...
Rivets & Diapers. The list of McCardell firsts stretches back 20 years. She was the first to modernize the dirndl skirt (1938) and the first to use trouser pockets and pleats in women's clothes (1938). She was the first with the widely copied "Monastic" dress, a full and shapeless forerunner of the pleated Grecian sheath and all the other unwaisted dresses. It seemed to have no form. But when it was belted on, it did great things for the female figure. It was McCardell who first started using blue-jean stitching for design in rough denims...
...Germany. It just happened, and no one was responsible but "the times." Nazism was pretty much like anything else: "Perhaps all that can be done is to describe it as a phenomenon, as a byproduct of life, and like life to be immeasurable by any standard and equally shapeless." As for democracy, "I do not know what it is ... But I fear that Hit ler's assertion - that his ideological concept was the democratic concept - will prove a hard one to refute." If he is not the former Nazis' favorite postwar writer, he should...
Lack of Format. Last year NBC signed him, but spent months trying to work out a proper format for his peculiar, shapeless brand of comedy. It was a tough job, since no one, including Gobel, could pin down his style. "I don't think it's like anybody else's," he says. "I didn't think about it until other people started describing it. They described it in so many ways, I get kind of mixed up. I guess it's offbeat, casual. I get a line I figure will be funny...
...prancing circus horse and rider) that showed off a remarkably agile and expressive 6-ft. 4-in. body. The week's second big color feature, Cole Porter's Panama Hattie (CBS), boasted Ethel Merman, but even Trouper Merman could not keep the show from becoming a busy, shapeless, cluttered mass of sight and sound...