Word: left
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first, the American Farm Bureau Federation; the third, the left-wing Farmers' Union, supports the Brannan plan...
Only a few friends gathered at Cleveland's Union Terminal last week when Bill Veeck (rhymes with heck) left town. But Cleveland knew he had been there. For 3½ years, as majority stockholder and impresario of the Cleveland Indians, 35-year-old Promoter Veeck had turned the crank that gave the town its dizziest merry-go-round ride in years...
Always Leave Them Laughing (Warner) is a schmalzy backstage film that has been knowingly tailored to Milton Berle's measure. Previous movies in which TV's favorite entertainer has appeared not only robbed him of his special brand of comedy but left most of Berle on the cutting-room floor. This attractively bedraggled production allows the Berle style full rein, for better or worse. As a result, Berle comes through as a powerfully unkempt personality-the prototype of the life-of-every-party...
Suggesting a left-handed biography of Berle himself, the story catalogues the rise to television fame of a comic who specializes in gag-stealing and belligerent self-interest, and stops at nothing to keep an 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...
This joke, which was originally made in the French Chamber of Deputies decades ago and which eventually found its way into the anecdote section of the "Readers Digest," is typical of those in the movie. Almost all of the laughs arrive by way of deep left field and are put across with the heavy hand of amateur gag men. This is unfortunate because four of the participants are capable of real humor. Besides the traditional Hepburn-Tracy team, the movie present Judy Holliday of "Born Yesterday" fame and Tom Ewell, who played Ensign Pulver in "Mr. Roberts...