Word: benchleys
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WELCOME TO XANADU by Nathaniel Benchley. 304 pages. Atheneum...
...Author Benchley, 52, son of Humorist Robert Benchley and himself a successful comic novelist (his book The Off-Islanders became The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming), is a careful tailor of dialogue and characterization. But by laboriously presenting stop-action, caseworker-like descriptions of his characters' psychological past, he unfortunately produces a general air more clinical than criminal, a climax that is more Gestalt than gothic, a final effect that evokes a quiet Oh, yes, instead of a stricken...
...first job, writing captions for Vogue. At 24, she married Edwin Parker II, a businessman from whom she was later divorced but whose name she kept. In 1917 she moved up in the magazine world, joining the staff of Vanity Fair, where she shared an office with Humorist Robert Benchley and the incipient Playwright Robert Sherwood...
...grew up in Manhattan's Hotel Algonquin (her father owned it), became a sort of midtown Malory by chronicling in The Vicious Circle and Blessed Are the Debonair the activities of the 1920s' Algonquin Round Table (a luncheon gathering of such literary jesters as Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman), also contributed articles to Vanity Fair and a series of notable theatrical profiles to The New Yorker; after a long illness; in Manhattan...
...Russians Are Coming were as good as its best actor, the laughter might reach gale force. Sad to say, Director Norman Jewison and Scenarist William Rose, working from a novel by Nathaniel Benchley, seem too anxious, or too unsubtle, to sound the depths of a delightfully quirky human comedy. Instead they try too often for ding-dong farce, calling on a corps of hard-sell comedians to transform the townfolk into strident cartoons. Jonathan Winters as an addled police officer, Ben Blue as an irrelevant drunk, and Paul Ford as a sword-swinging Legionnaire are the chief offenders, since their...