Word: tempo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Producers' Showcase stripped the Old Vic's 2½-hr. Romeo and Juliet down to a tidy 72 minutes last week, and the operation was a dramatic success. Apart from the quicker tempo and TV's obvious advantages of closeups, fadeouts and greater fluidity, the presentation also contributed Otis Riggs's clean, spare scenery which released play and players from the Old Vic's 19th century picture-book designs. John Neville, in the role that Olivier once dismissed with Mercutio-like disdain ("Romeo is really a jerk"), was carved out of beaverboard; he crashed parties...
...theme of Nabokov's Lolita is the carnal pursuit of a twelve-year-old American girl named Dolores Haze by a middle-aged European emigre in the U.S. named Humbert Humbert. The lurch toward the farcical, implicit in the hero's name, sets the mood and tempo of the entire work. The first of the novel's two volumes becomes an elaborately breakneck, amorally funny chase that mixes the Marx Brothers with Krafft-Ebing. This blurs but does not erase the underlying sensuality of Humbert's admittedly perverse tastes, for he is drawn only to what...
...respite be altogether happily profane; the theme turns more than dubious, it turns dull. And the telling in Tunnel is no help. In dealing exclusively with errant husbands, expectant wives and unwed mothers, it is essential that there be a light touch that leaves no smudge, a swift skating tempo that outrides thin ice. The Tunnel of Love gives even its brightest remarks the neon lighting of the wisecrack instead of the sheen of wit; it makes its stork deliveries not swoops from the housetops but road-rumbling, door-banging trips by United Parcel...
March 12, 1932 was a raw, sunless day in Paris, and the city's restless tempo was slowed to a funereal rustle as Frenchmen filed into la Salle de l'Horlage at the Quai d'Orsay to stare at the bier of the illustrious pactmaker. Aristide Briand. All Paris seemed to be wrapped in a shroud of melancholy over the passing of the great democrat-all but a luncheon party of American. British and Swedish bankers who waited in edgy silence at the Hotel du Rhin to confer with an autocratic emperor of finance. "Match King...
...fellow soldiers that they mustered for departure to the front lines in oxfords rather than combat boots. So garrison-minded were their commanders that they issued orders while the bombs were falling that ties would not be worn and officers no longer saluted. Author Stewart catches the quickening tempo of panic. As he and a buddy ordered a drink at the posh Manila Hotel bar, they heard a girl with a brittle laugh telling her escort: "I wired Mom that it would be just a fabulous adventure. Fabulous...