Word: droll
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...cannot satisfy sexually. When he tries and she finds his ardor disgusting, he retorts, "How can it be? I haven't taken my clothes off yet." Allen's directorial eye finds amusement in restraint, allowing characters to wander in and out of a static frame, playing droll tricks on his own autocratic camera. Gordon Willis has shot the pastoral exteriors in delicate earth tones. In one lovely shot, Steenburgen, a backwoods madonna, reclines in the high grass and gently places a large, soft hat over her face. Camera and subject have relaxed into a moment of Manet beauty...
DIED. Goodman Ace, 83, droll doyen of comedy writers who created scripts for Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Bob Newhart, Perry Como and Danny Kaye from the 1940s to the 1960s; in New York City. He wrote, directed and acted in Easy Aces, a popular radio comedy from 1928 to 1945, which featured his wife Jane as a dippy mangier of language ("a ragged individualist," "up at the crank of dawn"). Ace, who always greeted his friends with a joke, asked that his tombstone be inscribed: "No flowers, please. I'm allergic...
Apart from the vault, the plot machinations include blunt instruments, arson and grotesque fright masks, but none of these prove either droll or scarifying. In the end, the old lady still rules her roost, but Claudette Colbert, alas, falls victim to the play. -By T.E. Kalem
However, Marvin is innately domestic ("I want a tight-knit family"), and through the agency of a psychiatric guru, Mendel, played in an excruciatingly droll fashion by Chip Zien, a leaky roof is kept over all heads. From the opening number, Four Jews in a Room Bitching, the humor is spikily and spicily urban and ethnic. The actors are spirited, and Director James Lapine's tempo is stopwatch crisp. In astringence and cleverness, Finn is the child of Stephen Sondheim. In the current musical theater, no one could choose a better master or pay an apter tribute...
...Also, vicious, infuriating, cruel and unfair. NBC President Fred Silverman no longer returns his calls. His thrice-weekly Washington Post TV column, "On the Air," syndicated in 59 other newspapers, causes teeth-gnashing in Hollywood and heartburn in Manhattan's network headquarters. Critic Tom Shales, 33, the plump, droll, sometimes zany man at the heart of all this Sturm und Drang, puts his brown-and-tan saddle shoes up on the desk in his cramped fifth-floor office at the Post and shrugs off all the fuss: "The networks don't think they should be written about. They...