Word: wittier
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...fanfare was a trifle excessive. Many a musical has been fresher, cleverer, more original; several Cole Porter shows have had wittier lyrics, catchier tunes. But as a splendiferous version of regulation musicomedy Du Barry Was a Lady is all there. Its costumes are gorgeous, its goings-on boisterous. Its wit is almost nil, but its wisecracks are raw as a cannibal sandwich, suggestive as a red light burning in the hall. Bert Lahr is at his best-which is good enough. Ethel Merman is at her best -which is tops...
More aggressive, wittier and compact is 42-year-old Lancelot Hogben (Mathematics for the Million), an English biologist who calls himself a "scientific humanist" and is a kind of English version of iconoclastic Thorstein Veblen. Writers and statesmen he attacks for their ignorance of science, scientists for their ignorance of social matters. In addition he attacks Marxists, liberals, classical scholarship, "sentimental internationalists," theology, economists, and educators who permit children to study what they like rather than what is good for them (science). On the constructive side, he advocates biotechnology as a way to make nations self-sufficient, thermodynamics...
...Borrow or Steal (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Frank Morgan, as a "steerer" of European tourists, poses as proprietor of a chateau in order to provide for his visiting daughter, Florence Rice. The dialog is wittier and the characters better rounded than usual in this type of program-filler...
...Issued this week by the Harrisburg, Pa. Telegraph and Telegraph Press was a book which was to have been Candidate Long's big campaign publication. My First Days in the White House. Modeled after Upton Sinclair's I, Governor of California, but wittier, the book presents an imaginative narrative beginning with Huey Long's election to the Presidency, concludes with his setting up his Cabinet, among whom were: Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt; Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover; Secretary of State, William F. Borah; Secretary of War, Smedley D. Butler; Secretary of the Treasury, James Couzens; Attorney General, Frank...
...year at Radcliffe, then studied with Georges Vitray in Paris, later at the Theatre Guild's defunct school under Winifred Lenihan. Critics, who had not seen her in Manhattan since 1932, applauded her sly caricatures of the U. S. scene, rated her less profound than Draper & Skinner, wittier than either. Some of the Howe Characters & Caricatures...