Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...express its raptures only by predicting the imminent eclipse of Renoir, Resnais, and Fellini. This is ludicrous. To compare Kubrick with European directors is to denigrate the achievements of both. Kubrick attempts no subtle characterization, and few cinematic tricks. Using, rather than probing, neuroses, he fills his screen with comic stereotypes, all conventionally focused in stark black and white. Except for several shots of mushroom clouds and B-52's, the movie could easily be adapted to the stage...
...still writes best about childhood. The long middle passage, which flashes back to the days of St. Agatha's, catalogues the small terrors and large thoughts of preadolescence with delicate insight. It could stand on its own as a finely wrought novella, and probably should, since the contemporary "comic" passages that flank it are flabby by comparison...
Then the drama begins, and it is constructed like a prizefight. In the early rounds the opponents politely feel each other out, and there is time for the referee to provide low comic relief ("Am I running this committee," Senator Mundt splutters ineffectually, "or am I not?"). In the middle rounds the opponents get down to serious slugging, and both take damaging blows-the evidence demonstrates that McCarthy attempted to blackmail the Army and that the Army then attempted to buy McCarthy off. But in the later rounds, McCarthy begins to swing wildly, and Joseph N. Welch, the Army...
They underestimated their enemy. Hoiles, now 85, may be a political crank, but he is also a newspaper pro. And he had a big bankroll to boot. His News snapped up the good comic strips, flooded rural districts with sample copies, cut subscription prices to 25? a week, and countered losses by putting out free copies of a shopping guide offered to advertisers at rock-bottom combination rates. Hoiles also strengthened his editorial staff, concentrated on local news, added a Sunday TV supplement. By 1960 the News pulled ahead in circulation and began to get advertisers back. The News still...
Filtered through the mad wit of Billy Brown, these grotesque gyrations sometimes threaten to spin out of control into pure centrifugal farce. But at his best Novelist Miller has come close to creating a comic epic celebrating the lunatic fringes of a genuine American phenomenon-a young nation's yearning for final answers and impossible perfections, its fears that a great dream has somehow been laid waste in the pillaging of a rich continent for material wellbeing...