Word: songful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Song. That evening, to wind up the anniversary program, the aristocracy of the Communist world flocked to the Grand Palace of the Kremlin, where once the Czars and their nobles made merry. Jauntily, Nikita Khrushchev moved among his hard-drinking guests, smiling and shaking hands like a ward boss. Once, captured by an excited female comrade, he let himself be whirled through a few dance steps to the accompaniment of shouts of "Molodets!" (bravo). Later, somewhere in the background, half-drowned out by laughter and the clatter of dinner plates, an orchestra burst into the strains of an old song...
Rumple (book by Irving Phillips; music and lyrics by Ernest G. Schweikert and Frank Reardon) has just one real asset: Eddie Foy. He has the twin gifts of perfect stage presence and quiet audience courtship, the jaunty, pinpointed song-and-dance-man skill of the vaudeville era. He knows every last little hop, skip and jump, and nudge, bop and scram; he is master of the soft shoe, the dead pan, the faraway smile. As Rumple, a newspaper-cartoon character in danger of extinction because his creator has lost the power to portray him, he fights for survival with tactics...
That afternoon Ike and Mamie filed into Michie Stadium, loudly sang the Army fight song and settled back to watch the cadet varsity kick off to Colgate. The game was six minutes old when the United Press slipped Ike a piece of copy on the ouster of his old wartime colleague Marshal Zhukov from the Presidium and the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Ike sent thanks to the reporter, settled back to watch Army win. Reporters had not seen Ike so cheerful and relaxed in a long time. An old Army wife explained it easily: "He's back...
...Communist officials let him have it fortissimo for writing music that failed to trace a melodic line straight to the heart of the average Russian. Composer Shostakovich has long since recanted his sins and been allowed once again to sing for his supper. The song he sang last week, his brand-new Eleventh Symphony, was supposed to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Actually, it was dedicated not to the big (1917) Bolshevik Revolution but to the lesser, abortive rebellion of 1905. The composition, too, was lesser and abortive...
...picture does have its moments. Paolo Stoppa is excellent as the Count's harried servant; Chevalier can still put a peculiar lilt into a French song; and despite a washed-out process called Ferraniacolor, the Riveria remains the Riviera...