Word: backdrop
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since there are two playing fields, the hose was alternated daily upon the field not used by the players. Nicknamed "Ol' Faithful," the geyser-like spray of water formed a backdrop worthy of Billy Rose's Aquacade to the scene of men running, tackling, passing and kicking...
...this picture, into an embarrassing passage of whimsy involving a flustered retreat (from amorous John Lund) among filing cabinets, and a panicky recitation of Paul Revere's Ride. Millard Mitchell handles the smart cracks ably, but since the brightest and nastiest of them are delivered against the terrible backdrop of Germany's annihilated capital, their echoes go a little sour...
...bare floodlit stage of Nanking's National Assembly hall strode the Gimo, erect and austere in five-starred military khaki. He took his stand under a backdrop portrait of Sun Yat-sen while 2,500 Assembly delegates applauded.Then Chiang Kai-shek reported on the state of the nation...
...down onto waiting shoulders to be borne on stage. "I'm getting too fat for this," grumbled hefty Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. A warrior-god charged into musty corners, looking for his sword; bored spear carriers fumbled through a prop basket full of hunting horns. Behind the backdrop a ragged army of stagehands lounged on the rocks of the Rhine (out of use for the moment), gulping coffee from paper cartons and jeering at a stableboy who was trying to direct a sorrel horse on stage...
...Gilded Hearse is the story of one day in the life of Publicity Man Eliot. It happens to be the day in 1938 that the Munich Pact was signed, but the stunt of employing momentous events as a backdrop for Eliot's neurotic strivings for cheap success never comes off. To bring it off requires more than making a character tune in on the depressing broadcasts of that day every few pages and glibly crediting the hero with a "premonition of shapeless disaster...