Word: clever
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...Clever people, those Orientals. Consider baseboru. For nearly three decades after the professional game was introduced to Japan in 1936, the native teams politely and honorably lost to visiting U.S. clubs in a series of postseason exhibition games. All along, of course, the Japanese players were learning while losing. Just how much they learned became shockingly clear to the San Francisco Giants last year. When they went to Japan to take on such supposed pushovers as the Taiyo Whales, Nankai Hawks and Chunichi Dragons, the Giants were clobbered in six out of nine games. Now, anxious to pick up more...
...does now to cast a jaundiced eye on the obvious decadence of subject matter in the plays of Shakespeare's successors: the sensationalism, the fascination with sex and death, are currently such familiar features of art that audiences will surely delight to find in John Ford such a clever hand at depicting them. Writing in the strange cultural vacuum which preceded the English Revolution, John Ford took old relationships and old labels-husband, wife, virgin, brother, sister-and read into them lurid new meanings...
Miss Loden manages at times to make the heart ache for Wanda's rootlessness and empty-headed plight. As a director, she captures the ambience of small-time roadhouses with compelling accuracy; she manages through some clever location photography (done in and around the Pennsylvania coal-mining country) to convey an almost overwhelming sense of lingering desperation. Her debut as a director, despite its flaws, is both welcome and promising. · Jay Cocks
...spark is as ephemeral as Ali's in the thirteenth round. The director has done everything possible to obstruct dramatic tensions. The violent actions are more uncomfortable than discomfiting, the quiet moments are languorous. Against the evening's generally ham-handed pacing, Porter's songwriting-dancing interludes seem too clever by half. The actors strive valiantly to overcome the director's schematized conception, but only John Archibald (who plays both Porter's friend Cliff and Mrs. Porter's father) is successful...
...first act of Loot was extremely funny; the equally clever machinations in act two seemed pallid and a bit too taciturn by comparison. This can be attributed to the dulling of one's ability to be shocked, when the same sort of ludicrous out-rage is repeated again and again. Sex and religion, which rank after death as targets of Orton's jesting, also reach a point of diminishing returns after the first machine-gun fire of jokes. Lines such as "God is a gentleman. He prefers blonds," or Truscott's "I wasn't expecting pharaohs" to Hal's cowering...