Word: shrewd
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...hottest personalities in Hollywood last week were neither blonde and seductive, nor tall, dark and handsome. They were a couple of shrewd, bouncy septuagenarians with white fringes around their bald heads. Producer Samuel Goldwyn, 73, was hard at work on the Runyonesque musicomedy Guys and Dolls. Cecil Blount DeMille, also 73, was producing and directing a supercolossal remake of his first (1923) The Ten Commandments. These two movies, bossed by two old experts, were the most expensive and most talked about in town, and both were a long-way from The Squaw Man, Hollywood's first feature length film...
...reclothed clichés of thought so vividly that they long ago became cliches of language." He can persuade the reader that gabby Letter Writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is worth another whirl: "She had very few friends, but time was one of them." And he can be shrewd about such old critically-untouchables as Robinson Crusoe: "Having contrived all by himself a Little England, he turns Friday all by himself into a Little India...
Dictator Fulgencio Batista is a shrewd politician who knows when to give an inch to save the ruler. For two months he blocked a congressional move to grant amnesty to political prisoners and exiles, even though the mood of the country was clearly in favor of it. Last week Batista gave in gracefully, told his majorities in Congress to push through a sweeping amnesty bill...
Among wriggling dormitories and three-cornered orange peels on the MIT campus, an awesome cylinder of bricks is being raised heavenward. That this unique type of structure be erected as a place of worship is more than ironically sagacious: it is downright shrewd. For, especially here on the MIT campus, form must follow function, in this case, to inspire divine thoughts in the pragmatic-and-recently sobered heads of MIT scientific supermen. the problem of directing brains from the mechanisms of Ac-DC current, the path of least resistance, to thoughts of the spirit, the divine essence and meaning...
...Lynn has clearly made a shrewd choice in selection of subject matter. Instead of criticizing literary style alone, he has written a work filled with perceptive sociological insights into turn-of-the-century American society. Using the well-known Horatio Alger story as a touchstone common to five novelists, Lynn has traced the impact of the success myth upon each artist and has indirectly produced a profound commentory on the fiercely competitive Big Business era. The summarization of an age through its literature is dangerous history; but here it proves very effective. Through skillful blending of the novelists own beliefs...