Word: devilment
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...largest question raised by the moon-landing, Mailer said, "was whether God or the Devil was at the helm. When it happened, I felt that the world had gone forever out of the control of the people I know...
...held the patient's left arm," he complacently lectures Starusch, comparing the painless extractions of today with the dental horrors of a century ago. "The second wedged his knee into the pit of his stomach, the third held the poor devil...
...these days, the story of Applause is a retread of the 1950 movie All About Eve. A young actress, Eve Harrington (Penny Fuller), carefully masks her ambitions in order to insinuate herself into the friendship and concern of an established theater star, Margo Channing (Bacall). Middle age is the devil's prompter in Marge's mind, popping biting retorts in her mouth about the jeopardy of fame, and chilling qualms in her heart about her love affair with a younger director (Len Cariou). With serpentine guile and horizontal campaigning, Eve slithers her way upward toward Margo...
...epitomizes the new look in black humor, it is probably Flip Wilson; he seems to have solved the considerable problem of how to be black without being racial. Like Cosby, he tends to narrative rather than one-liners. His harridan housewife who swears to her hapless preacher husband, "The devil made me buy that dress!" may become one of the classic routines of American comedy. On a funkier level is Richard Pryor. Aside from his extensive repertory of anal and armpit gags, Pryor does such splendidly satirical routines as "It's a bat, it's a crow...
...Gideon is forced to throw out everything except Askelon in a battle that is not so much pitched as rigged. Gielgud lends the part a tremulous, blinking dignity, but he can only play it the way Shaffer wrote it: as the milquetoast of human kindness. Like the devil, the devil's advocate has all the best lines, even if many of them are overwrought and overwrit. It is Magee's poet-haranguing, seducing, at once flailing out with and wincing from his own lash-who jolts the play occasionally into the corrosive credibility it ought to sustain throughout...