Word: balsamic
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...Dustin Hoffman adopts precisely the right attitude of bewildered reality lost in myth, a photograph projected on a Frederic Remington painting. Unhappily, not all the cast is as comfortable in their roles. Some of the whites, such as Faye Dunaway as a preacher's oestrous wife, and Martin Balsam as a bunco artist, play like fugitives from a road company of The Drunkard, with galvanic gestures and frozen speech patterns. The Human Beings, by contrast, are a people of dignity and variety. Among them are the homosexual Little Horse; the contrary Younger Bear, who says "hello" for "goodbye...
...comic actor that he is wanting. In the part of Colonel Korn, he violates the first rule of humor: if what you're doing is funny, you don't have to be funny doing it. Playing outpatients of Dr. Strangelove, he and his Tweedledummy Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam) italicize every punch line. Even their faces are overstatements. As General Dreedle, Orson Welles sweeps past like Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, all plastic and gas. Dreedle need only have GREED lettered across his middle to complete the cartoon...
...TURNS out that the balsam fir used to make the paper towels produce a compound very similar to the bug's juvenile hormone. But unlike the silkworm hormone, it hits only a single family of bugs. If nature can provide such highly specific insecticides through evolution, Williams argues, man should be able to develop some himself...
Among the Paths to Eden, by contrast, makes much of its plainness. A widower, Ivor Belli (Martin Balsam), brings flowers to his wife's grave. Tending her father's nearby tombstone, Mary O'Meaghan (Maureen Stapleton) strikes up a conversation. Within moments, it is obvious that the meeting was no accident-the female mourner has been haunting the cemetery because it is a convenient place to meet unattached men. When Belli confesses that he has a mistress, Mary O'Meaghan bids him polite farewell-and pursues another widower taking another path to his wife...
Stapleton and Balsam are two of the most seasoned professionals in show business; both listen and react with a skill that lends the slender script warmth and pathos. They receive scant help from the Perrys. In the original story, Belli, despite his name, is Jewish. Here he is simply "Russian." In the story, Miss O'Meaghan sits atop a gravestone and imitates Helen Morgan singing Don't Ever Leave Me-and is interrupted by a file of shocked Negro mourners. Here she is given a bland song (lyrics supplied by Eleanor Perry because rights to the original were...