Word: cowardly
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Maggie feels really alive only onstage. "Everything is sharpened and heightened, and I know what I'm supposed to be," she says. "I feel safer." With her gifts, she should. The ultimate comment on Maggie's precise, disciplined style comes from Noel Coward, who directed her in a deliciously campy revival of his play Hay Fever at the National in 1964. Coward has a horror of "faffing," which is the affected hemming and hesitating that shatters the rhythm of a line or a scene and blurs its point. "Maggie," proclaims Sir Noel, "never faffs." Except offstage. There...
...dialogue of Start the Revolution Without Me oscillates between satire of late Chateaubriand and early Coward. Such deliberate flatulence and obvious double-entendres make for bright, brittle repartee but also a total lack of focus. The film first spoofs Fairbanks-Flynn epics. Then it attempts to satirize Byzantine court intrigue and ends in boudoir farce. In his overzealous attempt to create rococo madness, Producer-Director Bud Yorkin ignores comic economy. Orson Welles' opening narration is gratuitous, and his appearance at the end creates an anticlimax that almost guillotines the movie...
...Hemingway in a nose-measuring contest; purposely keeps his gold Bulova set eight minutes fast; dined alone with the Trumans their last night in the White House; can get away without tipping hat-check girls at New York's Inmost restaurants; introduced Two-Ton Tony Galento to Noel Coward and Marc Chagall to Richard Nixon. Leonard Lyons also is the last syndicated celebrity columnist who does all his own legwork...
...military string ensemble pumped out the dansant tunes in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace as Master Farceur Noel Coward, 70, was dubbed a knight of the realm. In a simple, almost offhand ceremony, the entertainer knelt on a small stool and took a sword tap on each shoulder ("very lightly, thank goodness," he said later) from Queen Elizabeth II, who wore street clothes. "The Queen was absolutely charming," Coward told newsmen. "She always is. I've known her since she was a little girl." Then Sir Noel strolled off with a lady on each arm, wearing a rakishly tilted...
...COWARD: Not at all. I'm fascinated by the subject...