Word: daft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mike Nichols touch, always deft, daft and droll, flicks The Odd Couple along at a dervish's pace. But it is Neil Simon's comic freshness of vision that provides the inner momentum. Simon rarely tosses a line straight up in the air for an isolated gag; he hits it across a net of personal relationships so that a steady volley of wit builds up out of character and situation. Simon also knows how to prod a cliché off its bed of banality so that it walks toward the brink of logical absurdity. "Who'd send...
...heebie-jeebies. It calls up unnerving images. Seven stray cats finding their way home to a haunted castle. Donald Duck meeting Frankenstein. Hordes of psychotic chipmunks slaughtering each other for nuts. But The Moon-Spinners, filmed in picture-book color on the island of Crete, turns out to be daft and breezy escapism assigned to a cast of flesh-and-blood actors headed by Hayley Mills. Given a plot that might fit snugly into the Nancy Drew mystery series, Hayley plays it with the knowing air of a junior-miss James Bond...
...Millicent Martin), he hires an aging, aristocratic wastrel (Denholm Elliott) to guide him through a whirlwind curriculum of fashionable prejudices. "Say 'bloody' a lot," counsels Elliott. "Know a few dirty jokes about the Caesars." When tutor and pupil take aim at the Establishment in a series of daft vignettes-playing squash, touring Cambridge, or off on a jolly shoot-Nothing but the Best looks and sounds like superlative satire...
...CHILDREN AT THE GATE, by Edward Lewis Wallant. The author's last novel, completed before his death last year at 36, tells of a daft but saintly man and how another slowly takes life and grace from...
...Prime Minister's secretary by mistake. Fifteen British magistrates agreed that M'Naghten did not understand the "nature and quality" of his act-in short, could not tell right from wrong while committing the crime-and was therefore insane. Instead of going to the gallows, the daft Scot went to an asylum...