Word: comical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ADAPTATION-NEXT. Two one-acters, both directed with a crisp and zany comic flair by Elaine May. Miss May's own play, Adaptation, is the game of life staged like a TV contest. Terrence Mc-Nally's Next features James Coco in a splendid performance as an overage potential draftee...
...sheriff (Charles White) has labeled a Red Menace. With an election pending, the mayor has a certain cynical interest in corralling the law-and-order voters. John McGiver plays him with the voice of high-pitched dismay and the countenance of flinty melancholy that make all his appearances comic delights. Naturally, this plot thickens and quickens as the rival newsmen cook up story angles and bait the mayor and the sheriff as knaves and boobs. The notion that journalism radiates intelligence and innate purity is fairly amusing all by itself...
...objection to the traditional novel is essentially negative, rising as it often does from despair about the possibilities of rational, orderly, middle-class society. Black comedies, happenings, novels without plots are on the whole grim experiments, and the laughter they offer is at best a kind of comic rictus...
Vladimir, acquaintances remember, was handsome, courtly, occasionally terribly amusing at parties. It was not for Nabokov, though, to commit the hilarious gaffes of his comic creation, the emigre Professor Timofey Pnin. Years of having to conform with dignity as an outsider had marked his manner. Mrs. Yvor Winters, widow of the critic, recalls that Nabokov would never kiss a woman's hand, as many other refugees did. "If I were in Russia," he once confided to her, "I would kiss your hand...
FORD'S DRAMATIC vision is simultaneously forthright and elusive, and the interest of these introductory notes is only to mention two characteristics which permeate all his films. First, Ford is a master at the sudden juxtaposition of emotional quantities. Serious scenes will turn into comic ones, then revert suddenly to introspection. The greatness of this is that Ford carries the audience with him totally; we are rarely conscious of these shifts and instead experience them without question or intellectual judgment. In Donovan's Reef (1963)--a good film for examining this--the mood of each scene in the second half...