Word: songful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CRAZY OVER HORSES, by Sam Toperoff. "Horses, horses, horses, crazy over horses," the old song goes. Not quite as repetitive but equally obsessed, the zealous author has transformed a lifelong weakness for the ponies into an oddly winning novel-memoir...
...mama: So for a quarter of a century I went on dreaming about a happy state of affairs, which is unthinkable for a Soviet writer-to be able to write and publish his writings without restriction and without fear. Not to choke off his own song. To have no thought for party instructions, government-appointed editors and political censors. Not to start trembling at every knock on the door. Not to be hiding his manuscripts away in a hole in the ground almost before the ink on them...
Loesser was as single-minded about his work as any compulsive crapshooter. Rising at 5 every morning, he toiled long and hard, pruning his tunes and polishing his words. "For every song I let out," he once said, "there are six in the basket that nobody will ever see." A small (5 ft. 6 in.), tough-talking, chainsmoking man, he reminded some of George Raft, others of a Guys and Dolls bookie. To keep busy in his off hours he took up hobbies (painting, carpentry), and from time to time he expressed the hope that they would help him give...
...probably the greatest American composer-lyricist. They were both superb melodists, but Loesser was not as interested in sophisticated word play as Porter. As his producer, Cy Feuer, recalls, Loesser "was a champion of the one-syllable word." As good proof as any is this line from the title song from Guys and Dolls...
...trap-like streets, in the finest tradition of German Expressionism, stress his fears of this setting, fears augmented inside Dietrich's dressing room by a clown and a "professor" of magic who implicitly mock Jannings' position. The impingement of settings and objects on Jannings' security climaxes in a song sequence where Jannings seated in a theater box, is distracted by a ship's nude figurehead and other sexual objects. But his attention is captured by the true embodiment of these themes, namely Dietrich, and as the film proceeds her power in his perceptions transcends all else...