Word: sings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Toscanini said that a voice like hers comes but once in a century. Now Contralto Marian Anderson, 61, has decided that it will soon be time to retire. The first Negro to sing at the Metropolitan Opera (in 1955), possessor of a score of honorary degrees and countless other kudos, she will undertake one last world tour running from next October to the following June, with a final U.S. appearance on Easter Sunday, 1965, in Carnegie Hall. Carnegie's box office is already getting ticket requests...
...staccato "new cinema" pace-and for irony, tons and tons of it. Foreman likes his irony set to music. While troop trucks slog through snow, he cuts to a slide announcing: THE MANAGEMENT OF THIS THEATER WISHES EVERYBODY A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR 1945. EVERYBODY SING! Later, there is mawkish sentiment when some gentle British folk invite Peppard-on crutches-to have tea, then slip him a ten-shilling note, which cues in several bars of There'll Always Be an England...
...with candor-or perhaps it's just a heartfelt desire to shock. A twelve-year-old homosexual leaves the Germans and offers himself as a G.I. camp follower. A French lieutenant coolly obliterates every sign of life in an enemy pillbox that has already surrendered. Soldiers in transit sing out that old favorite Bless 'Em All, blurrily substituting that four-letter verb common to army camps but not to Hollywood movies...
...finest scene is marred by excess: as a pathetically boyish American deserter is led before a firing squad in a vast snowy field, the sound track erupts with Frank Sinatra's dulcet warbling of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, followed by Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. The choice seems arbitrary, a victory cheaply won. Or does an audience really have to be elbowed black and blue to understand that war is a far cry from Christmas...
...about to supplant "fight, fight, fight" on U.S. campuses. From Anchors Aweigh to All Hail Alaska, the college song is still uniquely American. Britons save their tears for school songs like Harrow's Forty Years On. Oxbridge has s no official songs whatever. Germans I and Frenchmen sing of beer and wine...