Word: static
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...progress . . . increasing productivity [and] a constantly broadening distribution of purchasing power by an ever-improving ratio of prices to wages [i.e., higher wages or lower prices]. Unless the buying power of the masses, whose wants create markets, is progressively expanding, business will have to be content with a virtually static situation...
This sort of journey-through-society script might have led to a movie that really moved with the erratic spontaneity of street life. But The Bicycle Thief is oddly static. Events move predictably and almost mechanically. Each small experience of the distraught hero is meticulously rounded and forced in sentiment, character coloring and social comment.Even the minor movements of the actors-the boy's tumble on a rainy street, the mother's fingering of her cheek-appear overrehearsed...
...Brooklyn theater last week, 4,000 junior high school students booed Russia's Andrei Vishinsky and warmly cheered U.S. Delegate Warren Austin. Except for these partisan outbursts, the teen-agers found the long speeches and static drama of the specially arranged telecast of United Nations in Action (weekdays, 11 a.m. & 3 p.m., CBS-TV) neither so funny as Milton Berle nor so exciting as baseball. "Of course," one 14-year-old conceded, "baseball is more known, because it's older than the United Nations...
...audience laughing. The movie includes an endless parade of vaudeville turns with Berle running through his television repertory, throwing in some slapdash imitations of Ted Lewis, Al Jolson, Bert Lahr, et al. Though most of the skits are single-set affairs shot by a rigid camera, there is nothing static about the movie. Berle's heavy cavortings energize the screen like a buffalo stampede. The fact that his comedy is so desperately anxious to please and so hit-or-miss in its shotgun methods adds a human element that is rare in modern-day comedy...
...determinedly friendly Norman Brokenshire, who has been on radio almost as long as static, has lost his faith in his trade only once. In 1926, after two years as a staff announcer on New York's WJZ, he left radio for vaudeville, convinced that "as time goes on, the announcer's role will become less & less important." That was the first of more than a dozen exits from the industry-and the only voluntary one-during the quarter-century in which convivial Norman Brokenshire has fought his well-publicized battle with alcohol...