Word: woodenly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...their son "Chip," 7. "I didn't do it," he insisted. "I couldn't do it to any animal or any human. I couldn't have possibly done such a thing." The jurors took up their task in a locked room, crowded with a table, twelve wooden chairs and 214 court exhibits, some ugly with blood. For five days the seven men and five women-all had been married and one was a college graduate-debated the evidence. They dismissed the legal oratory as "just dramatics." A juror explained: "We were not moved by these arguments...
...support an hour show. Kraft TV Theater ambitiously tried Camille on NBC and Kitty Foyle on ABC. Signe Hasso coughed and swooned appropriately as the lost lady of the camellias, but as her burning lover, Jacques Bergerac (currently Ginger Rogers' husband) had scarcely as much animation as a wooden Indian and spoke his lines as if he had learned them phonetically. Cloris Leachman did pretty well as Kitty Foyle, although for most of the play she was more long-suffering and put-upon than Christopher Morley had intended his spirited heroine...
Tasteful borders of carved wooden or plaster masks, expressing the emotion under examination, would have really done wonders for the film. In future, this is the direction that wide films should take. Carved decorations in the awkward borders, for one thing, would relieve actors of projecting emotion. Henceforth, when a pretty young friend of some producer wants to register anger, instead of furrowing her generally marble brow, she need only point, with languid grandeur, toward the appropriate mask. Her charm need not be destroyed by the necessity of acting. This could mean great things for the future of television...
Bartok: The Wooden Prince (The New Symphony Orchestra of London conducted by Walter Siisskind; Bartok, 2 LPs). Music for a "dancing play" from the late Hungarian master's middle period. The plot: boy wants girl; fairy queen (in enchanted forest) thwarts boy; girl wants boy; boy bored. The music, completed in 1916, before Bartok had honed down his modernities, is as lush as Richard Strauss, as elegant as Debussy...
...Still Life with Portraits, a weathered door hung with a worn horseshoe, a bugle, an ancient pistol and pictures of Lincoln, Sarah Bernhardt and Henry Clay. Another achieves part of its realism because it was done in collaboration with his seven-year-old son, Neil. Against the usual wooden background, it shows a leaky water pistol, Halloween masks, a torn piece of a newspaper photo and a child's slate. On the slate is a drawing of a witch-by Neil...