Word: cleverness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...connection of a common excellence. Most of the roaring successes--many of them also starring Humphrey Bogart, depended on tight-knit plots that, while fine alone, were garnished by unusual characters and brilliant lines. Beat the Devil rambles through the bare vestige of a plot delighting the audience with clever dialogue and swamping the screen with fantastic characters. Humphrey Bogart, for the most part, plays the same role he has perfected over the years. If he was called Rick, Sam or Harry before, and Billy now, the role hasn't changed; nor should it, since it is what he does...
What Cocteau allowed to become trick photography in Orpheus he kept as normal-if extraordinarily clever-direction in Beauty. Working with Miss Day, and with Jean Marais as the Beast, the director made an elementary and familiar plot into a small triumph of mood and attitude: a fairy tale for the bigger kids. ROBERT J. SCHOENBERG
...special congress did not help French morale by voting, roundly, that it wanted no part of the French Union in its present form. And in July 1953, the U.N. negotiated a truce in Korea. Across France a great cry swelled: Finish la sale guerre by negotiation-like the clever Americans in Korea. That cry is loud...
During most of the second act there is nothing. No jokes, no clever lines, not even significant exposition. We find that the demonstrative couple has moved into a poorly furnished 9cheap, ill-constructed set) new apartment and that the former neighbors have moved in, too Thus we have pushed through forty minutes of tedium to the point of the act One curtain...
While its charm is impaired by a bitter denunciation of the sort of social "game" that must be played by rules, The Rules of the Game is still a comedy. Chase scenes and insinuating servants join other well-aged comic props, twisted by the Renoir touch into a clever and enjoyable satire...