Word: cleverness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...four men during the credit background and plays a human being for the rest of the picture. The principals are thus left free to develop an interesting and often humorous plot. Dealing with the life of a wounded badman recuperating in a Quaker family, the script is both clever and tasteful. The writers manage to convey the beliefs of that seet with all the necessary finesse and still draw the comedy of ardent pacifists playing hosts to a befuddled rustler. While the action follows through to the hoped-for conclusion, the climax happily avoids time-worn convention. John Wayne...
...amount of gore sprayed around the set, Republic Pictures have refused to fob off a thousand rounds of ammunition as entertainment and have turned out a refreshingly novel movie. Although the "Angel and the Badman" contains enough of the usual ingredients to satisfy any grammar school desperado, the clever and entirely feasible plot will be a welcome relief to gun-shy adults...
...less continuous indigestion from rich food, liquor and lack of the exercise to which they are accustomed; innumerable Things Seen which will make them authorities not to be contradicted by the stay-at-homes for a long time to come; the sensation of having gone somewhere and returned in clever safety to their starting point...
...word play rather than comic situations, is much less at home upon the stage than upon the printed page. But a fair number of recognizable bon mots still remain, together with sketchy outlines of the plot, such as it is. And with some very pleasant music and some clever lyrics by a couple of freshmen in the musical comedy business, named Sidney Lippman and Sylvia Dee, and most especially with Nancy Walker in the cast, the book becomes a secondary matter. It's built around a sharply-pointed parody of Joe College on his home grounds tossing out below...
...simple-mindedness of the story is saved once in a while by Steinbeck's incidental touches. His chapters on Alice's solitary jag and on Camille's tired parrying of Louie, a diffident but brutal tinhorn Don Juan, are clever little stories in themselves. He writes with delicacy of the blundering stratagems and satisfactions of an adolescent mechanic called Pimples. But in theme and design the novel is a disappointing piece of second-rate, back-to-the-bulls fiction. Moreover, Steinbeck writes carelessly. Mrs. Pritchard has never known a day's pain on page...