Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Three characters on a suspension bridge, suffering garrulously from every known brand of contemporary self-pity. Theater of the absurd? Yes, but the flawless comic acting talents of Anne Jackson, Alan Arkin and Eli Wallach keep the absurd hilarious...
...principle of retributive justice-the infliction of present pain in return for past wrongdoing-is bad enough, but in the case of German war crimes [March 5], it may appear more absurd, since the victims are likely to be quiet, older men whose 20-or-more-year-old crimes were not only legal but officially approved when they were committed...
...mouth. In French Playwright Eugene lonesco's one-acter, Bedlam Galore, for Two or More, "She" and "He" quarreled, and quarreled some more, while a civil war went on outside and the roof and walls caved in to illustrate lonesco's philosophy that life is absurd. Electrically powered kinetic sculpture by Len Lye and Nicolas Schoeffer moved, twisted, roared and thumped at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. All this and more galore was part of the two-week Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today, perhaps the most all-encompassing, hip, with-it, avant-garde presentation...
Obviously the Groomkirby household is no ordinary one. This whole sappy movie may, in fact, be too extraordinary for its own good. Based on N. F. Simpson's London play and billed as England's jackknife dive into the Cinema of the Absurd, Pendulum shuns nearly every requisite for success. It shows little film sense, for its revue-style humor is more verbal than visual. It is often sophomoric, just as often wickedly funny, and has no plot whatever. To U.S. audiences its best-known players are Veteran Actress Mona Washbourne, as a pixilated aunt, and Writer-Actor...
Surprisingly, behind Pendulum's sometimes tidy, sometimes tiresome chaos, Writer Simpson has planted one or two ideas that swing. The Groom-kirbys, on the surface, behave like any middle-class family, and after a while their absurd rituals and lunatic discourse begin to seem alarmingly close to the norm. And as they blithely beat words to a pulp in their do-it-yourself Old Bailey, they somehow suggest that one way to solve the angst-ridden question of communication among men is to kill the language in self-defense...