Word: deftly
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Pamela Hansford Johnson, in real life the wife of C.P. Snow, can hardly be described as an old boy. Still, she has contrived a remarkably deft version of a peculiarly masculine genre. Downs Park is a prep school-a staging area from which very little boys can go on to the public schools. Perhaps predictably, the school's most gifted master turns out to be a thoughtful, non-U escapee from a technical college. Yet academic cliches and characters alike flash into brief, tantalizing existence, in part because the author talks about them in a tone of voice which...
Wyman Pendleton contributes a deft cameo as a lawyer who revels in hair-splitting; similarly with the paunchy Cockney sergeant of John Tillinger. Joseph Maher gets considerable mileage out of Major Swindon, who-echoing the Queen of Hearts' exclamation in Alice in Wonderland: "Sentence first-verdict afterwards"-proclaims, "We have arranged [the hanging] for 12 o'clock. Nothing remains to be done except to try him." At one point Shaw has him say, "You insolent-," breaking off after the adjective. Here Maher provides the noun "bastard"-which Shaw likely had in mind but could not have got by the stage...
...Deft Intrigue. Dobbs spends most of the movie trying to force Mellie to confess to murder; she spends most of her time trying to figure out just whom she killed. One unsure note is the convenient reason she resists Bronson's insistent interrogation: a childhood trauma has made her reluctant to confess anything. Still, Clement weaves his intrigues so deftly that such minor annoyances never seriously intrude...
...necessary to agree with the agitprop to discern in Playwright Lamb a deft lyricist with barbed wit and a no-nonsense lucidity about contemporary man-woman relationships. Papp moves an able cast around with fluent precision; as the other woman, April Shawhan is certainly one of the loveliest warriors who ever enlisted in the battle of the sexes...
...Douglas A. Fraser, 54, head of the Chrysler and skilled-trades departments. A deft, canny bargainer, Fraser had been considered the man whom Reuther was grooming for the succession -but not until 1974, when Reuther, at age 66, would no longer have been eligible...