Word: dumbness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Christian Democrats, confident of victory, found other portents. In Formia, near Naples, plump, moist-eyed Elvira Wangrillo told how a Communist had joined a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Itri where, confronted with the picture of the Madonna, he fell to his knees, struck dumb. "He has been that way ever since," related Elvira, "the doctors say it's a miracle...
...years now, the "poison" of Arturo Toscanini has been seeping out into the world. Drugged by it, millions of music lovers (and not a few critics) have come to regard all of the Maestro's music with dumb and unquestioning adoration. Certainly he has brought the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Verdi to life as no other man has. He is now a white-haired little man of 81, and when a human being reaches that age, his critics, remembering his finer hours, are apt to temper their judgments with mercy...
...indictment of the book business, The Gilded Hearse is neither good burlesque nor significant exposure. Few readers will be surprised to learn that book salesmen often haven't read the books they sell, that salesgirls in bookstores are often dumb, that book publishers are increasingly less concerned with literature than with bestsellers. Those with the kind of taste that Gorham deplores will be quickest to see that The Gilded Hearse is just superficial enough, spiced with just enough bedroom business, to make it a likely Hutchinson book...
...evenings because he is terrified at the possibility of running into some of the community's better-known Bright Boys. "I am short of the old I-am," he explains. "When I get mixed up with Nunnally Johnson or Herman Mankiewicz or Ben Hecht, I am struck dumb. I feel more comfortable in front of a camera." Actually, the very sound brain in his head doesn't run either to wit or to highbrow intellectual discussion. Alfred Hitchcock has said of him that he is probably the most anecdoteless man in Hollywood; it does not come natural...
Hard to Believe. Irma's characterizations are cut to the measure of the cast. Every one of the actors looks and acts his part in & out of the script. Most astonishing of all is Irma herself, Cinemactress Marie Wilson, who has been playing the role of a dumb blonde for so long that she now lives the part. Marie's fluffs at rehearsals and on the air are daffier than anything a scripter might imagine. "She is so much like Irma," says Sy, "that I have to rewrite the things she says to make them believable...