Word: aloud
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Though played in deadly earnest, Valentino is fun-in the sense that watching the jerky charades of early movies is fun. Its dialogue sounds as hackneyed as silent subtitles read aloud. Its simple-minded love story, which begs for trilling piano accompaniment, seems too naive for Valentino to have enacted even on the screen of the '20s. Its Technicolored Valentino (Anthony Dexter), trysting with the actress wife (Eleanor Parker) of his director (Richard Carlson), pours out his mockpassionate speeches in a thin stream of Midwestern nasality...
...rate very high. As poetry, however, it does much better. Mr. Phelps, I think, has mastered the difficulty of expressing conversation in poetry (if anything so doggedly exalted could be called "conversation"). His lines flow smoothly and naturally, and have real beauty at times. One need only read aloud a line like this: "Mother, mother, who is, what is, where is, God?" to realize that Phelps can write very forceful poetic speech. In fact the effective verse of the play almost compensates for the ponderous structure of its ideas...
...quickly spied the odd bulge bobbing under Smith's jacket. He stopped the platoon and commanded the recruit to unveil the unmilitary mystery. When Gorman, also a steady TIME-reader, saw the reason for the bulge, he ordered Smith to "share his knowledge" with the platoon by reading aloud while marching...
...Thousand Times Good-Night." In Cairo, Egypt, Aliyah Ibrahim got a divorce after telling the judge that her husband's passion for reading poetry aloud interfered with her sleep: "It is not worthwhile getting up in the middle of the night to listen to Shakespeare...
Died. General Ma Chan-shan, 65, onetime Chinese war hero; in Peking. Little, shaven-polled General Ma was both an illiterate, sharpshooting militarist (who bragged that he could shoot birds from a galloping horse) and a man of cultivated tastes (he fancied Mongolian silks and had staffmen read poetry aloud to him). Against Japan's march on Manchuria in 1931, he led the only serious resistance in North China to the invaders, then sold out and was briefly a puppet ruler...