Word: yarns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Lanphier: "I think it is going to be a long, long time before we have what I consider dependable, reliable [ballistic] missiles . . . They are intricate beyond human belief." Also beyond belief, according to Kindelberger, is the state of the Pentagon. "It reminds me," said he, "of a skein of yarn with which the cat has been playing for years. It is badly snarled and loose ends stick out all over. . . It cannot be untangled by wrapping more yarn on the outside. . . It is a big, vast, intricate thing, and I don't think you can wind another committee...
...librettist had written the score instead of the book. The librettist (and stage director): Composer Gian Carlo (The Saint of Bleecker Street) Menotti, who writes the words for his own rousing operas, this time undertook to serve as librettist to his longtime friend Sam Barber. Menotti's yarn is like a pulse-bumping 19th century melodrama that lacks the courage of its afflictions. The lover, when he finally arrives, is not the man Vanessa was waiting for, but his son Anatol, a fatally charming young man who promptly seduces Vanessa's niece Erika. From there on the plot...
General Electric Theater: As Director and narrator of The Trail to Christmas, Hollywood's James Stewart spun a seasonal western yarn about an hombre named Ebenezer Scrooge, "the richest man in the whole territory." Sure enough, Dickens' A Christmas Carol made itself right at home on the range. When Bob Cratchit, a cowhand squatting on Scrooge's land, made his entrance, Scrooge snapped: "Where've you been? Rustlin' some of my cattle? It don't seem you're ever at the ranch when I come by." Marley's ghost wore...
...theme, The Music Man is just one more sentimental-satiric yarn about a fake who floods a dull hole with genuine gaiety. It has, besides, its sinking spells of wit and mild attacks of cuteness. More damagingly, the second act has an air of playing back much of the first, repeating all manner of effects. Fortunately, The Music Man can even walk backward and downhill with considerable élan; there is no denying the bounce of the show...
...William Faulkner. The malignant, unsavory Snopeses taking over Yoknapatawpha County from the noble old families who once controlled it and gave it graciousness. Intricate and convoluted as the book is in plot and in sentence, Faulkner gives it the air of a sly village idiot's barbershop yarn...