Word: awkwardness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...early twilight. But, even though the color is muted in these scenes, it protrudes everywhere; and the directing seems to feel obligated to follow the color--to feel obligated to keep everything clean and bright, to remain aloof, to treat the pathos as though it were an awkward intrusion which must be made the best...
Needless to say, the pathos is, in this production, an awkward intrusion. Contrasting strangely with the thick boffola of the comic scenes, it produces a sense of dislocation, a sort of emotional lacuna. Not that there is anything wrong with emotional lacunae: such an effect was doubtless what the producers of the original film were after. But the dislocation in the present version acts to no purpose and fails to convey the desired jarring effect...
...poetry in the issue, Thomas Weisbuch's Five Poems are the most competently constructed, although two, Prayer for Beasts and The Yo-Yo, are awkward and obvious. The other three are carefully designed, with an impressive easiness of rhythm. They are not particularly presumtuous, an attribute to which many may object, and they fulfill their purpose adequately, though without brilliance...
When I'm Thinking of You (Tommy Sands; Capitol LP). In his salad days, Singer Sands honked and rocked his way to sudden fortune with a voice like a jackdaw's cry. Now at the awkward age-22 -he has renounced rock 'n' roll for balladeering on the theory that "I have matured as a person." His latest album fails to prove that point, but at least it demonstrates that behind the old postnasal drip, a sweetly lyric set of pipes was growing all the time...
...picture of torture-Davenant's bloody sputum, his overpowering fatigue, his successive operations. With a callousness that is often the byproduct of continuously observed suffering, doctors compete for reputation and experiment with various treatments, while the confused patient gains hope, loses it, and finally subsides in confusion. Awkward nurses blunder, the food drives patients to mutiny; in the background lurks the cut-price competition among sanatoria entrepreneurs, who often measure their profit margins by the pennies they save in the kitchen. Seen as an expose of the tuberculosis racket, The Rack would be notable as a muckraking novel alone...