Word: comical
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...director does not imply that he is tops in all respects. As they acquire prestige, directors acquire specialties. Capra's is a certain kind of peculiarly American, peculiarly kinetic humor, in which the most individual characteristic is an extraordinarily adroit and constant use of "business" to accent the comic line. Unlike Gregory La Cava (Stage Door) or Leo McCarey, whose The Awful Truth took top honors for direction at the Academy this year, Capra has no interest in jokes whose appeal is touched with neuroticism. He is sufficiently versatile to have made a successful picture from a story...
Like her five previous novels, Monday Night is at its best in creating momentary moods of neurotic tension, in flashes of brilliant writing. Its central character is a comic grotesque called Wilt, a washed-out, oldtime, expatriate newspaperman, middleaged, garrulous, full of stories he never got around to writing. In a promising beginning, Wilt is introduced on a Paris street corner in mysterious talk with a big, naïve pal named Bernie, a medical student just arrived from the Midwest in hopes of meeting his hero, a famed French toxicologist. Wilt, who had met Bernie only a few hours...
...sentenced to life imprisonment on the toxicologist's evidence. Meantime, Wilt reels off his unwritten stories, long since ignoring poor Bernie, who whimpers because Wilt won't stop to eat, because he has been seduced and because he has lost his money. Unfortunately, the comic side of this Walpurgis Night wandering diminishes when Author Boyle endows Wilt with an intuition, inspired by drink and his own fantasies, that enables him to solve in one night a fraud which takes seven years for the law courts to see through. Modest readers, unable to figure out Kay Boyle...
...Press section of TIME, July 18 the recent portrayal of President Roosevelt in the Joe Palooka comic strip is suspected of being the first comic .strip portrayal of an incumbent President...
...francs to bestow for one kind deed, a wave of benevolence envelops every mudlark and ragamuffin in the South of France. But to the real millionaire (Warner Baxter) a pretty circus performer (Marjorie Weaver) is most kind, and nobody doubts who is to get the million. Result: a comic-opera Riviera, almost but not quite a lively, amusing farce...