Word: take-off
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...hefty (but undisclosed) price for permission to broadcast it. On the air, it hardly seemed worth all the fuss. Despite a few diverting sight gags-e.g., Benny, in full Victorian rig, standing impassive as ceiling plaster rains down on him-the long-delayed take-off shed more gas than light. One of the rare high spots: when Benny urges his wife (Barbara Stanwyck) to take dinner in bed, she screams hysterically: "I had breakfast in bed, I had lunch in bed. I can't have dinner in bed-it's full of dirty dishes...
Perhaps the best of Comden-Green is their quicksilver asides. In a take-off on 42nd Street flesh cinemas ("Doors open promptly at 3 a.m."), Doorkeeper Betty barks: "You've heard of Madame Pompadour, you've heard of Madame DuBarry. Now dig Madame Curie, the greatest madame of them all!" From their turkey Bonanza Bound, they resurrect Inspiration, which credits women with inspiring great men through the ages. "That's enough of that Oriental stuff," cries Betty as Composer Rimsky-Korsakov's wife. "Just look around you in your own backyard." Suddenly she sees a backyard...
...singing is the hardest thing in the world to do." She makes it sound like the easiest, as she concocts a wistful chant out of Oscar Levant's Blame It on my Youth, throbs through Limehouse Blues, races with a fine, light lilt through The Springtime Cometh, a take-off an old English madrigal ("Gaily skippeth, nylon rippeth, zipper zippeth, whoop-de-do, which is to say, the springtime cometh"). For Cole Porter's urbane lyrics, her precise, finishing-school inflection provides just the right sophistication...
...crash on take-off or landing with the reactor operating would scatter radioactive material over a wide area...
...Chung Hua Jih Pao (Righteous China Daily News), the island's only newspaper. All night long the engine had wheezed, supplying erratic power for the lights by which Chinese compositors handset four tabloid-size pages of type. The little engine rested briefly while a workman slipped the power take-off belt from the generator to an ancient flat-bed press. Then it snuffled back to life, to begin the daily press run of 7,000 copies...