Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lenya or Marlene Dietrich, for whom pitch was not important. She could wander off key in every bar, yet the song's content remained pure and intense. Andrews is ten times the musician Lawrence was; her voice never varies a hemisemidemiquaver from the written notes. In the exuberant comic numbers, person and impersonator coincide. But when Julie attempts a bittersweet ballad, like Do, Do, Do or My Ship, the styles collide. Lawrence always suggested a melancholy sensuality; Andrews continually gives the feeling that beneath the lyrics, everything is just supercal-if r agilisticexpialidocious...
Lefty's Fury. Plimpton spends his nights talking over golf lore with other tour members and reads an extensive list of golf books, all of which only confuse him more but give the reader comic insights into this special form of sportsworld hysteria. There are tales about golfers attacked by rams on the course, golfers breaking their legs after mighty swings, distance records for balls rebounding off caddies' heads, and the inevitable stories about the golfer's rage. Some golfers knock themselves out in their anger at a missed shot. Some punish their clubs, threatening to drown...
...Boston Strangler should have been as fascinating to view as it was to read, but the film is afflicted with its own kind of split personality. Early on, Director Richard Fleischer opts for the comic touch, in the style of No Way to Treat a Lady. A parade of men's room queens, peepers and certified nuts pass in review, and the film mocks them all. But after it has squeezed its last smirks from a lisping fetishist who makes love to women's handbags, the movie abruptly shifts direction. The downhill half is a quasi-documentary, reminiscent...
...Rainbow's light-headed whimsy is now done better by television, with its dreamed-of genii or married witches. Even so, the movie might have survived were it not for the ham-handed direction of Francis Ford Coppola, 29, whose only previous Hollywood feature was the moderately comic You're a Big Boy Now. Astaire and Clark are saddled with threadbare brogues, and both talk as if they were dictating letters to a tape recorder. Tommy Steele's hyperthyroid performance mistakes popped eyeballs for emotion and shrieks for singing. Coppola's idea of a scene-stopper...
...book is filled with comic scenes, acute insights and memorable characters -among them a salesman named Mr. Blue, who will perform 50 push-ups at the drop of a hint. The narrative ramblings, like a drunk's broken-field running, occasionally lose the reader in a muddiness of form. But they are part of the mad scramble that eventually makes Exley the winner his protagonist was so desperate...