Word: shrewd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...British-appointed governor, but with an elected local Assembly running most of the island's affairs, Jamaica has come along fast. The government is now headed by Chief Minister Norman Washington Manley, 62, the West Indies' most successful lawyer before he entered politics in 1938. Under his shrewd eye, Jamaica balances its $60 million annual budget. Money that Britain used to spend to bail the island out of debt is now funneled into "extras" like land development schemes and the newly built University College of the West Indies...
Mink on the Bed. As a businesswoman, Hattie was as shrewd as she was stylish. She knew intuitively when to extend credit and when to collect bills (she once successfully sued the late Jimmy Walker for his wife's unpaid $12,059 balance). She often quite literally sold the clothes off her back to eager customers, but would never allow a woman to buy a dress that seemed unsuitable. Her surplus energy spilled into other businesses, all of them successful: hats, jewelry, antiques, perfumes-even chocolate candy. By last year Hattie Carnegie Inc. was doing a gross business...
Director Billy Wilder was shrewd enough to see it. He signed Holden for the role of the mixed-up gigolo in Sunset Boulevard. The critics cheered, and chose Holden the best actor of 1950; but the public was still not wildly enthusiastic. One day in a supermarket-after 14 years as a Hollywood headliner-Bill saw a woman staring at him. "Young man," she finally said, "you really ought to be in pictures. You look so much like Alan Ladd...
Mencken's shrewd assessment suggests a clue to Dreiser's loneliness and the ursine indignation that set him on the path toward his final intellectual disaster. The man had a hankering after general ideas, but no talent for them. Dreiser had juggled with New Thought-a heresy from common sense fashionable before World War I-as well as with antiSemitism. Yet his was the genuine voice of a man who has lost his bearings in industrial society. His sense of pity and tragedy never left him, and for men of such temperament who retain a materialist philosophy, there...
...plot is a set-up for Fernandel's dolorous humor and his sad, shrewd, ludicrous countenance. Unfortunately, however, director Claude Autant-Lara has given the film a sombre tone which is not congenial to Fernandel's own whimsical, low-pressure style. Autant-Lara sets the mood with a choking death on a dark night (using typically French nonlighting) and the mournful intoning of a balladeer. The horror of death, however, does not stifle Fernandel's humor so much as the flat creatures at the inn. The French comedian seems ill at ease in these dark yet hysterical surroundings...