Word: besting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Passport to Pimlico. The British at their comic best, spoofing nationalism, bureaucracy and themselves (TIME...
...hoard as if they had slaved for it. Working on the notion that bank robbers are a likable lot among themselves and get the same pleasure out of their work as any other skilled craftsmen, Director Ray and Scriptwriter Charles Schnee have served up some fine, entertaining scenes. Their best characters: Howard Da Silva as a one-eyed lush who is outraged over the skimpy newspaper coverage of his bank robberies, and Jay C. Flippen as a hardened robber who has to work overtime to support a sister-in-law and buy his brother...
Author Vittorini, who was a Fascist in his youth, wrote In Sicily in 1937, when he was in the process of becoming a Communist. That may explain the midsection rhetoric. Only a fine natural gift explains the rest-and the best-of his story...
...brush stroke and simplified his situations ("I hate messing around with complicated backgrounds"). Some up-&-coming Arno types: the chinless, chestless little husband, and the ferocious, terrapin-eyed old girl of 50 who admires ballplayers ("We do sell them sometimes, lady, but only to other teams"). Arno likes best the gagless, slapdash sketches of clowns and nudes with which he has padded out his book, even hopes to hang them in a "serious" one-man show later this season. But he admits that he finds his fans (and the editors of The New Yorker, where most of his work appears...
Never Dies is loosely knotted together by a narrative that does its best to supply a romantic strand (India harbors a gorgeous American girl who has got herself into hot water by marrying a Siamese prince). But the fruity, feathered hat of glamorous romance is not one that sits comfortably on the head of ex-Missionary Margaret Landon. Her virtues are the warmth of her religious faith and the frankness with which she discusses such delicate matters as jealousy and rivalry among missionaries. The general result is too honest and heartfelt to be scoffed at, but too artless to make...