Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...difficult to know where the courtroom's wood paneling leaves off and Ray Milland begins. His supporting cast may be actors or still lifes. That fine old comic stager Melville Cooper is immured on the bench and reduced to clearing his throat. Still, he is spared dialogue like "Now, perhaps, you'll listen to reason," "Dammit, the police aren't fools," or "Where the carrion is, there will vultures be gathered...
What passes for a comic situation is that the partner and his wife are splitting up over a slightly bizarre sex problem. He gargles only on nights when he is in the mood, and once she hears him gargling she loses interest and falls asleep. What's more, as she announces in a distraught moment, "When I'm in the mood, he hasn't gargled...
...VISION OF BATTLEMENTS, by Anthony Burgess. Published 16 years after it was written, this early satirical distillation of Burgess' comic imagination is worthy of his later (1963) Orwellian Clockwork Orange. A Vision unfolds the misadventures of a mild-mannered sergeant in the British Army Vocational and Cultural Corps who muddles through World War II in the incongruous bastion of imperial Britannia atop the rock of Gibraltar...
...Once again TIME'S pseudo-sophisticated critics have missed the point. The Batman TV show [Jan. 28] appeals to a whole generation who learned to read with comic books before TV, and now can unashamedly rejoice in the return of their favorite...
...Robert Conquest (onetime literary editor of The Spectator) were educated at Oxford, and both are sometime university dons. Between them, they have produced 18 books, including six novels and four volumes of poetry; in collaboration, they have edited the science-fiction "Spectrum" anthologies. Now they have attempted a comic novel. Like many others, this one assumes that there is surefire hilarity when British characters natter away with upper-class accents on low-class subjects. Not so. This story, about a group of lecherous London husbands who organize the scholarly sounding Metropolitan Egyptological Society as a cover for some amorous prowling...