Word: songed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Paul Whiteman signed up the cherubic, long-lashed song-plugger when he was 18 ("I looked like an unfrocked altar boy"). In between his songs with the band, Downey sat with the brass section and pretended to blow a horn, although he could not play a note. His salary boiled up to $350 a week...
...novels on the New York Times's best-seller list, only two had a war setting; of the 16 nonfiction titles, only four concerned the war. The top song hit was a bouncy novelty for children, Swingin' on a Star; the three runners-up were sentimental lyrics, of which two (I'll Be Seeing You and I'll Get By) were years old. Manhattan, the very citadel of the new, reinforced the trend to the old and romantic: one night 21,000 people, the biggest crowd in two years, crammed Lewisohn Stadium to hear Oscar Levant...
...bird or a dog to twitter, bark or glare at its reflection (see cut). But unlike most such birds & beasts, the Rydal sparrow disdains all other windows and reflectors. So infatuated is the sparrow that it utterly ignores other sparrows, despite their "auxiliary attractions of smell and song...
Selznick has given Claudette Colbert the richest, biggest role of her career. She rewards him consistently with smooth Hollywood formula acting, and sometimes-especially in collaboration with Mr. Gotten-with flashes of acting that are warmer and more mature. He has brought his newest find, Jennifer (The Song of Bernadette) Jones out of the cloister and made her an All-American girl. She rewards him with a nervous, carefully studied, somewhat overintense performance. Selznick placed a big bet on Shirley Temple's comeback and she pays off enchantingly as a dogged, sensitive, practical little girl with a talent...
Yard-Wide Americanism. Though idealized, the Selznick characterizations are authentic to a degree seldom achieved in Hollywood. When a high-school graduating class sings America the Beautiful, the voices are touchingly inchoate, the singers' faces as stolidly reverent, and the shot of the Lincoln statue which begins the song and the meowing cat which ends it, are a deft, valid blend of showmanship, humor and yard-wide Americanism. The wounded men in Since You Went Away really look wounded, for almost the first time in a U.S. fiction war film. There are scores of such evidences of a smart...