Word: velvets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Chicago had a war. It was a commercial war, waged with Tommy guns, grenades, sawed-off shotguns, pistols, and speeding automobiles. Its soldiers wore a unique uniform-black velvet-collared topcoat and pearl-grey hat. It was a war which enriched the language, inspired a dozen books, plays and motion pictures, and damned the Volstead...
...Crown. One morning last week, when the sun caught the Last Supper window just right, a trailer bus deposited 18 red-robed council regents outside the court. They formed up behind the boys' choir. Carrying burning tapers, the procession marched into the jammed court and up toward the velvet-draped bier. After a short scripture reading, the choir began to sing Mrs. Bond's The Hand of You. Then white-maned Rufus B. von KleinSmid, Chancellor of the University of Southern California, began the "narration:" "No vote of critics, no surge of publicity can elect a composer...
...orchestras playing the same tune-one hot, one sweet. The orchestra's idea of le jazz hot was still in the wah-wah, funny-hat stage of the U.S. display bands of 1930. Maestros Alex Combelle and Andrea Leca were things of beauty in black ties and velvet jackets, but Combelle's gum-chewing guitarist wore a sweater with wide green and yellow horizontal stripes...
Suppose you take a guy with a mellow manner and a voice of blue velvet, name of Bing Crosby, add several measures of topflight tapping by Fred Astaire, sprinkle happily with a few cups of amusement by Billy De Wolfe and Olga San Juan, stir in 32 Irving Berlin tunes of ageless vintage, and include (more or less as a seasoning afterthought) a pretty feline-eyed gal whom the boys call Joan Caulfield. The final product--"Blue Skies"--should be, and is, by cinema standards, a fine bit of musical entertainment. Its conventionally silly plot has Caulfield vacillating between Crosby...
...libretto is itself a gypsy, decked out in every tarnished bit of satin and velvet in the operetta ragbag-Romany life, dukes, marquises, matinee idols, ballet dancers, imposture, revenge-and Paree. None of this has either a true romantic glow or a sly satiric glitter. The gypsy heroine who aches to be a lady (Helena Bliss) soon has all the more eligible tenors in the cast at her feet-but returns in the end to Sandor, her rough gypsy mate. For though Sandor may lack pelf and polish, he has the sock tune in the show, that great old Victor...