Word: backdrop
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...their cavernous new marble chamber, against their rich red velvet backdrop, the nine U. S. Supreme Court Justices looked magnificent but could hear little. To improve acoustics, more red velvet curtains were draped at either end of the bench. Result was to cast the justices into shadowy gloom. Last week the red curtains, side and rear, were swathed in white, and only in the front half of the chamber were inverted ceiling lights switched on. Thus the audience was thrown into shadow, the black-robed old actors into brilliant relief...
...Only flaws in this extraordinary feat of artistic naturalism are that when the beams (actually wood) strike something they emit a hollow thump instead of a ringing clank, and that when the inevitable victim falls from the crane to his death, a ludicrous dummy is seen tumbling against the backdrop...
...inhabitants of far-off lands is given on a pack of 18th century French "educational" cards. The artist's conception of the American aborigine is a dusky savage dressed in skins with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. Local color is provided by a backdrop of a crocodile, representing American wild life...
...agree that burning or surgery may obliterate the finger patterns entirely. Last week a bald, hulking criminologist named Carleton Simon expounded in great detail a method of identification which no criminal could circumvent without blinding himself. Dr. Simon would use the pattern of blood vessels in the circular backdrop of the eye. Almost infinitely various is this network in different people, and the chance that two persons might have the same pattern is as fantastically improbable as identical fingerprints. Age or disease may change the character of the eye veins and arteries, but not their position...
...Opera is spending $80,000, importing such peerless Wagnerians as Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, Tenor Lauritz Melchior, Baritone Friedrich Schorr. Some $40,000 has been invested in scenery alone. There is a horrible, life-like dragon and a special new cloud machine which projects photographs of actual clouds on the backdrop...