Word: witnessed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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John Crosby's pugnacious pose on the jacket of "Out of the Blue" looks like a Walter Mitty conception of the cynical newspaperman. Though there's a swagger in Crosby's prose as well, his wit and sound judgment as a reviewer makes this collection of his best columns very entertaining...
...Wit is the more important of Crosby's attributes, for as he admits himself, even a limited critical insight can recognize the ridiculous aspects of radio and television. And with commercials, soap operas, and give-away shows, any reviewer finds Sitting Duck the staple fare of networks and channels...
...trial last week in a courtroom of Prague's grim old Pankrac prison. The unhappy 14 stood up while a 14,000-word indictment was read against them. Then, one by one, they "confessed." They were broken, half-dead men, but they had been left with enough wit to repeat the intricate fables, involving dozens of well-known names inside & outside Czechoslovakia, which their merciless interrogators had impressed upon them. There were no non-Communist newsmen in Prague, much less in the courtroom; but the confessions were broadcast, in the defendants' own dead voices, over the Prague radio...
...French at all. A mannered 18th-century mixup, Les Fausses Confidences was all ambitious mothers and wily servants, dissembling lovers and trumped-up letters. But in an elegantly stylized production, the play seemed almost to be danced. Done so lightly, even its witless deceptions had an air of wit. Madeleine Renaud made an exquisite widow; Barrault, playing an agile valet, had about him a touch of quicksilver, of Mercury himself. To enjoy the production it was less necessary to understand French than to respond to style...
...only wit in the show lurks in the lyrics by Ogden Nash, and fortunately. Miss Davis recites rather than sings the best of them. The outrageous rhymester's lines are deft and often delightful, particularly when coupling words like respectable and "Toulouse Lantrectable." Nash's lyrics are set to pleasant music, though none of the tunes is likely to stick with you as far as the subway station. One which might is Roll Along Sadie, a lively number which suggests that Anita Loss might have been kinder to Sadie Thompson than Somerset Maugham...