Word: shrewd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nothing but embarrassments. Two of ABC's new entries are adaptations of stage and film hits by Playwright Neil Simon. The Odd Couple is the one about the two men who split from their wives, share an apartment and unwittingly caricature their own fallibility as spouses. ABC was shrewd enough to cast Jack Klugman, the only possible substitute for Walter Matthau, as the slovenly sportswriter. This time around, his fastidious roommate is played by Tony Randall who, if not up to Broadway Predecessor Art Carney, is apter than Hollywood's Jack Lemmon. Pray for Simon's babies...
Author Charlie Gillett begins his story back in the '40s, when the rhythm-and-blues musicians who sang about "rock and roll" were talking about loving, not music. It took some shrewd record producers and a Cleveland disk jockey named Alan Freed to make the term-and the music itself-acceptable to a larger, white audience. The sound came off the streets and was segregated as carefully as the people who listened...
...anecdote, among the best in this personable, skillfully concocted autobiography, is characteristic Zeckendorf because, win or lose, he has always managed to come out sounding like a winner. After all, a man as shrewd as Howard Hughes would only send for the best...
Director Cy Howard, a former gagwriter, keeps things lively by providing his performers with shrewd bits of comic business. In one memorable interlude, Dishy, having finally conquered Miss Hailey, lies spent and sleepy on the bed. Miss Hailey wants to know if the interlude was really something more than merely physical. In his desperation to be rid of her, Dishy moves so far away from her that his head rests on the night table. If it lacks real depth, Lovers and Other Strangers also lacks pretension. It aims only to be thoroughly diverting, not definitive. And that...
Professional Jealousy. Somewhere along the way, Frost's fury at rejections fanned out into a general, capricious malice and crass opportunism. Much of the book is devoted to an appalling accumulation of trivial plotting and backbiting. It was a shrewd Yankee who first told Frost that good fences make good neighbors, because contracts in particular meant little to him. A publisher once got the poet's approval before signing up an early biographer. Frost gave it, but finding another writer even more idolatrous, he awarded him the exclusive rights-leaving the publisher with two authors for one book...