Word: deadpan
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...Morricone (1900). Their work is stunning; yet there is no mistaking Days of Heaven for anything other than an American movie. Malick's ability to capture the terror in plain, homespun settings recalls the spooky vistas of Painter Edward Hopper. The film's naive narration-recited in deadpan colloquialisms by the teen-age Linda-is right out of Ring Lardner's sardonic stories. In the tradition of these other native ironists, Malick keeps his distance from his material. Though built around a heartbreaking love triangle, Days of Heaven has no introspective dialogue and no Freudian fireworks. Accordingly...
Fashions in public curiosity do change: once biographies were moral, meant to inspire emulation, as in the lives of saints or successful businessmen. Then came debunking journalism. Now, in a time of uncertain standards, the narrative style is neutral, deadpan: intending neither praise nor censure, but prepared to settle for provocative quotes and a plausible likeness. Readers too seem less judgmental, interested less in someone's character than in his or her "life-style." That mood could change, and if it did, so would the journalism. But an interest in people won't go away...
There are at least two memorable performances in the film--but they come from characters on the periphery. One is Francis Faye's Madam Nell, the whorehouse madam. She delivers a series of deadpan wise-cracks with the dry timing of a George Burns, and this cool sexual sarcasm produces a clever variation on Mae West's old routines. But in the end the bit doesn't mesh with the plot; it is precisely because of her toughness that we fail to be touched her Madame Nell goes crazy after the authorities shut down the brothel. The house's black...
...Billy never lets the character become plastic, and as his beloved, Ellen Burkhardt is a wonderfully pert ingenue, an island of sanity at sea. Kevin Usher as the gangster Moonface gives a performance that Bert Lahr would have loved, full of snarls that melt into whimpers, and with a deadpan that borders on hysteria. During his amusing solo, "Be Like the Bluebird," his playful vocal tricks give way to a voice as soaring as any in the cast. Phoebe Green's moll Bonnie, suggests the roll of the ocean all by herself, like a slightly underfilled waterbed: push...
...remains very moving. For a whole year, he painted and repainted an eggbeater, a rubber glove and an electric fan. His Eggbeater No. 4, 1927-28, with its cool interlocking planes of methodically laid color, is one of the robust documents of what Davis himself called, with his usual deadpan wit, "colonial cubism...