Word: blithest
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...written Hecht's biography; he loved brash charlatans and made comic art of their deceptions. Hecht should have written Sturges'; he would have wrung high irony from the story of a gallivanting rich boy who grew up to be the top writer-director in pictures. And one of the blithest. "All I do is wave a little wand a little," purred the orchestra conductor in Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours, "and out comes the music." For five glorious years, 1940-44, Sturges waved his wand and out came words and pictures. Nothing but Hollywood's most distinctive satires: The Lady...
...definitive period. In between, by way of atonement, Cutler has admirably showcased a parade of comedy bits, from the infamous live lamb to Keith Rogal's slimy portrayal of Corporate Evil as the interloping lawyer. Still, no amount of carbonation can lighten this load; Curse would weigh down the blithest spirit with distaste for these starving and unstarving misfits, compassion for their situation, and deep-rooted discomfort at their closeness to a twisted but familiar reality. And that, after all, is the point...
...without making him a rapacious stock villain, nor can it present the savage as anything but an improbably heroic amalgam of Friday, Chingachgook and St. Francis. A pity. The cast are an attractive lot and, as some lyrically nude bathing scenes demonstrate, Miss Agutter possesses one of the lithest, blithest young bodies on public view. Were the eye the only judge, Walkabout might be considered a treat. But no, Roeg and his scenarist Edward Bond (BlowUp) aim for the mind and miss wildly. Their preachy, anti-intellectual Natural Mannerisms are neither convincing...
Preparing for his 70th birthday, Master Farceur Noel Coward made it clear that one of the blithest spirits of the age is still blithe. Defending his lack of an Oxbridge education to London newsmen, he said: "It is of little help at the first rehearsal to be able to translate Cicero." What of T. S. Eliot's complaint that Coward had never spent an hour in the study of ethics? "I do not think it would have helped me," said he. Had he ever tried to enlighten his audience instead of just amusing them? "I have a slight reforming...
...shot off one day, and I don't want to." He talked privately of how his father had watched the Eisenhower funeral on television and of how the former ambassador had thought that his youngest son was being buried. Ted, who had always been the blithest brother, and the least intellectual or introspective, could now be morose at times...