Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Rossini: Stabat Mater (Maria Stader, Marianna Radev, Ernst Häfliger, Kim Borg; RIAS Symphony conducted by Ferenc Fricsay; Decca, 2 LPs). The composer who was once advised by Beethoven to stick to comic opera, here turns up in a churchly (if not always churchlike) mood. The chorus sings some lofty and properly devotional counter point, but the lovely solo voices have arias that bounce and flow with the joyfulness of the Barber of Seville. Performance: elegant...
...slopes of Mount Hood, zoom east for a water spectacle at Jones Beach, take in a couple of scenes from Julius Caesar at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ont., listen to a jam session on New Orleans' Bourbon Street and switch to Tijuana to watch the Mexican comic pantomimist, Cantinflas, fight a bull with nothing sharper than...
Itch is beautifully mounted in De Luxe-color CinemaScope, and Marilyn Monroe's eye-catching gait is more tortile and wambling than ever. She also displays a nice comedy touch, reminiscent of a baby-talk Judy Holliday. After listening to a Rachmaninoff concerto, Marilyn gets real comic conviction into her voice when she decides it must be classical music "because there's no vocal." Tom Ewell brings the expertise of long familiarity to his part of the agonized husband, but Director Wilder has let several of Ewell's monologues go on a shade too long. In minor...
...integrates the smaller, selfish goals of individuals into larger, more social and spiritual objectives for the group . . . Conflicts are resolved by relating the immediate to the long-range and more enduring values." Faced with this assignment of relating his product to his God, many a chewing gum manufacturer, comic-book publisher, movie distributor or banker might well fall to his knees. But, says Ohmann, this would all be to the good...
...with publication of his first novel, Tarr, Lewis sprang suddenly into true prominence. Tarr was not only his first large-scale assault on woolly vaporings about love and life, it was (and still is) one of the greatest comic novels ever written in English. None of Lewis' later novels-even The Revenge for Love, The Apes of God, The Childermass-has ousted Tarr from first place, but each displays uniquely the mingled anger, intellectual probity and hair-raising humor that are the stamp of a Lewis opus. What is most curious and most defective about all these novels...