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THE CREAM OF CROSBY
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awarded the award for the best screenplay to three men who wrote "The Greatest Show on Earth." In Hollywood, two's company; with three you're alone.
The Crosby Most Interesting Pronunciation Award, which ranks in stature roughly to that award for devices to measure sound distortion, goes unequivocally to Walt Disney. Reading off the list of nominees for music, he contributed the names Geeno Carlo-Menotti and Frank Loser (a fellow I've thought of as Frank Loesser all these years).
This is essentially a Hollywood show so it's understandable that the New York crowd jammed in a theater at Columbus Circle should be given short shrift. And short shrift it was. The picture would jump 3,000 miles from California, a miracle of communications, and there would be Conrad Nagel saying, "Well, we're still here but we've been told to keep it brief, so take it away Hollywood." And we'd be back in Hollywood.
Frederic March swam into view from New York and said: "We could tell some bad jokes but we must keep it brief — so back to California." Coming right on top of Mr. Robert Hope, who had made a passel of bad jokes, it was a pointed remark.
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"One fare to Milwaukee, please?"
I don't know that awards will ever make very interesting television for the simple reason that awards are always local affairs, of interest only to those who might win. Still, I hope they keep televising them if only to keep me abreast of "thank you" oratory. I have only one other observation. If "The Greatest Show on Earth" is the best movie of 1952, my critical judgment ought to be retooled from head to foot.
New Sage from Baltimore
GERALD JOHNSON, who has a program called "Viewpoint" on Baltimore's WAAM, is both a democrat and a Democrat but, I should say, he puts the interests of the first ahead of those of the second. A remarkably lucid, sane and sensible man, his commentaries are marked by a historical perspective almost wholly lacking among other commentators, few of whom, for one thing, are endowed with his remarkable education.
He takes the long view on democracy about which he remains incorrigibly optimistic. His greatest service, though, is in reaffirming the older values which are likely to get lost in the hurly burly of day-by-day politics. Once he belabored the Baltimore politicos for loading the ballot box with referendums on matters the politicians should have made their own decisions on without bothering the busy electorate. Yet, he pointed out, when a politico did make a decision on his own "there is a terrific howl about dictatorship and undemocratic methods."
And he had some wise words to say about that: "We can't get through our heads the difference between pure and representative democracy. We are still wrapped up in the town meeting idea which was pure democracy and workable only in a very small group dealing with very simple problems. The democracy of ancient Greece blew up because it stuck to the town meeting idea too long. In Athens everybody voted on everything and in the end it destroyed Athens and gave democracy a bad name that lasted a thousand years."
Johnson has a great gift for putting contemporary events into their proper historical framework. He has had more to