Word: villainous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...week's end the TV Christmas season got off to a superb start with NBC's color spectacular, Babes in Toyland. Comedian Jack E. Leonard finally hit his TV stride as a bumbling villain; there was Wally Cox, Dave Garroway, a brace of excellent clowns and a fine magician, and the TV children as well as Dennis Day were pleasantly inoffensive. With all their help, Victor Herbert's tuneful old musical was translated into one of Max Liebman's best TV shows...
...hero-and villain-of the professional basketball arenas this season is a small board with blinking lights, set close to the playing area at each end of the court, in plain view of the players, officials, spectators and TV cameras. When a team gets possession of the ball, the board flashes the number 24. Then the numbers dwindle downward, changing every second. This warns the team in possession that it must try for a basket before 24 seconds have elapsed. Otherwise, it loses the ball to the opposing team...
Then one day Scobie falls in love with a 19-year-old girl (Maria Schell). Their raptures are brief. The heat, the secrecy, the difference in their ages, the knowing that they can never marry-all these things tell on their nerves. In the end, blackmailed by the villain, who has intercepted a love letter, Scobie is driven to crime in order to protect his wife from the knowledge that he loves another. And haunting him every moment is the sense that two women now, not just one, hold him to blame, as Scobie blames himself, for their unhappiness...
Whatever his mistakes, Director George More O'Ferrall can take credit, with Cameraman Jack Hildyard, for a powerful use of the camera to catch a mood. Hard and clear as the Syrian villain's eye, the frame takes in a stupefied huddle of tropical port: the tiny, eyeless box-buildings, the hot grey roads, the depraved palms, the dirty water that slides about the harbor. Beneath every scene is the sense of the black human jungle waiting to swallow all importance, and down upon everything blasts the terrible sun, like a pagan god who has come too near...
...villain, he became the U.N.'s No. 1 crowd-puller. He brought a kind of energy to the staid U.N. and many delegates liked to cross swords with him, watch him flail the table with his fists, see the top of his head go pink with anger. Some diplomats had a certain sympathy for him, but Vishinsky never allowed sympathy to break through his guard, constantly embarrassed hosts and guests with personal attacks. "Lots of venal people dislike their work," said Britain's Soviet Specialist Edward Crankshaw. "Vishinsky was venal but happy." In the strange and somber matrix...