Word: clownish
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...flea-bitten acting school run by a haughty, boozed-up impresario (Alan Mowbray) and his daughter (Vivian Elaine) make for broad, boisterous fun. With his syrupy delivery, chipmunk facial grimaces and gift for lighting his own finger instead of the leading lady's cigarette. Arkin is a clownish glossary of theatrical ineptitude. Making his debut, he catapults onstage and swallows his voice whole, but, as his parents rightly say, "he's the best one." Thanks to Alan Arkin, a playgoer can Enter Laughing and exit roaring...
...Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, by Tennessee Williams. A rich old clownish woman rages desperately against the good night of death, until a Christ-figure comforts her tormented soul. Hermione Baddeley plays the dying woman with blinding, blistering brilliance...
Director Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), a prime mover of the New Wave, exploits his star's Chaplinesque lost-waif charm, but Aznavour lacks the clownish resilience that enabled Chaplin's eternal tramp to give as good as he took from life. A hero who falls to his defeat generates dramatic interest; but the piano player seems to wallow in the complacency of his own despair, as if he were past caring and past caring about. Truffaut's centrifugal direction sends pieces of crime thriller, love story, and psychological case study flying off at unrelated tangents. Moreover...
...guild rejects the newcomer Walther, and offers his new love Eva as prize to the Master she thinks best. The guild realizes Walther's rare artistry only when it is led to it by the commanding stature of the poet and cobbler Hans Sachs. Although the production, through occasional clownish acting, burlesqued this setting too much, it did capture well the drama's union of art's fantasy with life's conventionality...
...rather disappointing, seen in the U.S. during the current three-year-old cultural exchange. Freely sentimental and seeded now and then with propaganda, the film nevertheless tells a harsh tale unforgettably and well. Hero Sergei Bondarchuk. who directs his own performance with skill, is a broad-faced, stocky man, clownish and touching as a young father, convincingly indomitable as a prisoner in German work camps. Finally he escapes, but life is pitiless; his wife and daughters have been killed in an air raid, and his son dies at the front...