Word: captiousness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Franklin Roosevelt Joe Kennedy saw last week was not the fractious, irritated, harried man who sat at the same cluttered desk last summer. A remarkable change has come over the President: once again he is relaxed, confident, charming. Gone is his captious attitude to the U. S. press. Old Mark Sullivan, dean of Washington columnists, noted the change a month ago, hopefully analyzed the President's bubbly jocularity as a signal he has decided not to run again...
...Indies, once the bourn of every explorer, source of spices and plumes and gold, home of the noble savage, Ophir, cradle of wealth, land of the faraway dream, are now the backyard of squabbling empires. Six captious countries have their pieces...
...captious might complain that there are no trained seals in the show, but there is everything else. Two or three of the acts are very good: Walter Nilsson cavorting madly on a monocycle, Hal Sherman pantomimes dancing adroitly while looking as awkward as Charlie Chaplin. But most of the acts are very bad: all the skits, a Turkish harem number, a roguish sister act performed by two girls each of whom looks like the other's mother...
Room Service, in its screen version, is open to criticism on one point. The Marxes have been playing as themselves too long to hope that the public will ever accept them as characters in somebody else's story. Captious critics may find that the resultant absence of illusion in Room Service impairs its hilarity. Loyal Marxists will find it well up to the standard of such predecessors as A Night at the Opera or A Day at The Races. Good shot: Harpo's happiness when the turkey, apparently gone for good, returns to roost nervously on a window...
...Donnell). Some of the humor gets grey hairs: The tenth time grandma upbraids grandpa for swearing is scarcely as funny as the first. The narrative, toward the end, begins to stagger and stutter. And Mr. Brink (Frank Conroy) stays up in the apple tree long enough to make the captious wonder if it isn't time for the leaves to turn. But that may be because the tree looks (as grandpa would put it) so goddamn natural...