Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Balloons & Barricades. The first relief expedition that set out by rail from Tientsin bogged down when the Boxers burned the bridges. A second was mounted with agonizing slowness and comic-opera disorganization. The 20.ooo-man force was a command nightmare, as seven nations (Japan. Britain, Russia. France, Italy, Austria, the U.S.) raced for glory. Nevertheless, the melee helped train such young military men as U.S. Marine Lieut. Smedley Butler, and British Naval Officers David Beatty and John Jellicoe. successively commanders in chief of the British fleet in World...
Will Joe Palooka's wife Ann have a boy or a girl? Last week hundreds of thousands of comic-strip readers were speculating on the birth of the aging heavyweight hero's second, child after ten years of married life, but because of matters legal, not medical, it was not even certain that the baby would ever be born. Reason: Moe Leff, longtime collaborator on the strip and its producer since the death in 1955 of Joe's creator, Ham Fisher, had sued to end his 20-year contract with Fisher's estate, quit drawing...
...illustrating this text, Bergman wobbles between drama and melodrama, alternates genuine horrors with sham tricks, comic sex with serious sex, and poetry with lampoon. Result is that The Magician is perhaps his least successful film so far. But for every murky symbol, there is a sharp physical image: footsteps become important, a thunderclap almost too real, and shafts of light through the mist startlingly beautiful. With the help of this brilliant graphic technique, a haunting guitar score, and the talented stock company of players who have turned up in all recent Bergman films. The Magician manages to fascinate...
...along an Italian road on foot while up ahead, U.S. troops were in deadly battle with a German rearguard; or the terrible day when he was caught in a Japanese earthquake and watched in horror as rescuers sawed through the arm of a pinned victim. He recalls with fine comic effect two G.I.s in top hats putting on a mock duel in the Italian moonlight, and he remembers the combat medics on bouncing Jeeps who, "kneeling and balancing and clinging miraculously with one arm, raised the other high, as one would a torch, holding a bottle of plasma, pouring life...
...arch dialogue -and looks less like the male Candida that Shaw intended than like a Sportin' Life in tights. Actor Lancaster, as the local parson, glooms away Shaw's most romantic scenes as if he were lost on a Brontë moor. In a climactic scene of comic derring-do, ex-Acrobat Lancaster makes heroic hash of a colonial court house and all the Redcoats in it. Otherwise he is as stiff and starchy as the clerical collar he eventually gives...