Word: cactus
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...Cactus Flower. Humor is often the puckish shadow cast by national character. English comedy is a running display of oneupmanship, reflecting an indelible class system. The Teutonic cast-ironies of Brecht seem manufactured by Krupp. The classic American comic event is the chase, a drolly tangible version of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. And the French sex farce is logic run rampant, reason carried to an unreasonable and absurd extremity. That is why French sex farces are innately sexless: Descartes wrote them all. They begin with cogito ergo sum, and they rely not on seduction but sophistry...
...Cactus Flower is such a French farce, seasoned to U.S. tastes with local situation gags by Adapter-Director Abe Burrows, garnished with appealing humanity, and served with unerring timing by a well-chosen cast. Lauren Bacall plays a dentist's nurse who looks "like a big white Band-Aid," speaks with an antiseptic voice that would intimidate gangrene, and lives a prim life with mother. The dentist (Barry Nelson) holds a master's degree in bachelorhood, and while he appreciates spinsterish efficiency in the office, he turns for amour to a Greenwich Village post-adolescent (Brenda Vaccaro). This...
...Hubert is Vice President, the Humphreys may have to say goodbye to Coquelin Terrace. Because there is no official residence for the nation's No. 2 executive, Hubert is encountering many of the problems that plagued his predecessors, some of whom also lived very simply. Calvin Coolidge and Cactus Jack Garner, for example, lived in hotels, and Harry Truman occupied a $150-a-month apartment. Some people did not think these arrangements very seemly, and there was always some agitation for the Vice Presidents to move...
Through Prickly Pear. Moursund is an all-round man in the best Texas tradition. He controls a local bank. He can survey land, brand cattle, ride a horse through prickly pear cactus, steer his Lincoln Continental through cedar brush in pursuit of game, drop a deer with unerring aim, then gut and skin the animal. To the Judge ranching is more of a pleasure than a source of income. Explains an associate: "He gets a real kick out of manipulating cattle from one pasture to another." He also enjoys food in quantity. When he speaks of a "couple of hamburgers...
...96th birthday. And so when 250 friends of John Nance Garner gathered at his Uvalde, Texas, home, they thoughtfully brought along a two-foot-high, German-style Baum-kuchen (tree cake), and two smaller ones decorated with the six flags that have flown over Texas. Cactus Jack eyed them. He studied his neighbors, many of whom can't rightly remember the days when he was Franklin Roosevelt's Vice President, a job he liked to refer to as "a spare tire on the automobile of government." Finally someone wondered how it felt to be so old. Said Garner...