Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...whole, the film compares favorably with the play. The scriptwriters, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, have added some happy touches of silly business. And though Actress Hepburn tends to wallow in the wake of Shirley Booth, who played the part on Broadway, she never quite sinks in the comic scenes, and in the romantic ones she is light enough to ride the champagne splashes of emotion as if she were going over Niagara in a barrel. Spencer Tracy has one wonderful slapstick scene, and Gig Young does very well with a comic style for which he is much beholden to William...
...Gaumont; Continental) is an American's idea of a Frenchman's idea of an Englishman's idea of France. The American is Director Preston Sturges, a comic genie (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) who was popped back in the bottle by Hollywood some years ago, but who recently popped out in Paris, where he made this film. The Frenchman is Journalist Pierre Daninos and the Englishman is Major Thompson, the hero of The Notebooks of Major Thompson (TIME, Sept. 26, 1955), a collection of Daninos' sometimes hilarious feature stories that has sold more than...
...intensity a small boy devotes to a wart. Items: French Suspiciousness, British Weather. The Cult of the Liver among Middle-Aged Frenchmen, The Function of the Horse in Anglo-Saxon Courtship Patterns. There is a marvelous visual essay on the ricochet principle in Gallic traffic, and the now-familiar comic scene in which a British mother gives her daughter some moral aspirin on her wedding night: "I know, my dear, it's disgusting. But . . . just close your eyes and think of England...
...German Composer Werner Egk (rhymes with peck), who at 56 has five other operas behind him (including The Magic Violin, Columbus, Irish Legend), was casting about last year for the makings of a comic opera ("I didn't want to see them leave unhappy") when he reread Gogol's The Inspector General. Egk decided it was just the kind of thing he needed. He hacked down Gogol's sprawling list of characters to a manageable 13, set to work composing a score to match the author's farcical tale of a provincial town paralyzed...
Robert Jordan, the director, usually sees and plays with these differences delightfully if a bit gently. He coordinates an airy style of acting with a fine comic sense and, even if there are no huge problems involved, moves his two characters skillfully in and out of (and onto) John Ratte's light and light-hearted...