Word: balsam
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Anderson's sight gag becomes howlingly funny when the first auditioner (Martin Balsam) appears. Anxious for the part but puzzled by its demands, the actor agrees to become fatter or thinner, remove his toupee, shave his chest-anything. As the real test of his abilities becomes clear to him, he begins to unbutton his shorts with a what-the-hell bravado. But life's little irony is that the playwright has fled, being the sort of man who cannot bear a dirty joke, let alone cast a nude male...
...third sketch striates humor with poignancy. A daughter is going off to college. Her mother (Eileen Heckart), pridefully modern, is anxious to turn the girl into a kind of one-woman prophylactic kit. The husband (Balsam) wants to preserve for his daughter something of the force, excitement and mystery of an intimately loving man-woman encounter. As a man who pledges his word and his heart, he is wounded at playlet's end by a generation that occasionally pledges neither...
Running would not skim along as effortlessly as it does if the cast did not slalom through the comedy with such dazzling grace. Martin Balsam, in particular, can be wacky, pathetic, puzzled and convulsive in sequence. Whenever Playwright Anderson's comic invention turns paper thin, Director Alan Schneider unfurls it with blinding finesse so that the show remains a ticker-tape blizzard of hilarity...
Almost daily, the President hopped into his tan station wagon and drove around the 400-acre L.B.J. Ranch to gaze at his menagerie of wild deer, turkeys, antelope and buffalo. In his paneled office, Lady Bird put up a 6-ft.-high balsam tree, speckled with colored lights and topped with a golden-haired angel in a blue brocade dress. The menu for Christmas dinner called for turkey, corn-bread dressing, string beans with almonds, sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping, rolls, cranberry salad, ambrosia and angel-food cake. The family celebrated Lady Bird's 54th birthday...
...picture and best director (Robert Wise). Veteran Lee Marvin, 42, the hilarious mugger in Cat Ballon, was best actor. The best-actress award amounted to a battle of Julies: Andrews (for Sound of Music) and Christie (for Darling) -and Christie won it. For their performances in supporting roles, Martin Balsam got an Oscar for A Thousand Clowns, and Shelley Winters got her second (her first, in 1959: The Diary of Anne Frank) for A Patch of Blue. The only other notable awards went to Czechoslovakia's The Shop on Main Street (best foreign-language film) and To Be Alive...