Word: droll
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Ervin, of course, is the wise old sage of the hearings. Like a visiting uncle, he dispenses his pearls of wisdom with droll humor and biblical quotations. But it is when he gets angry that Ervin is at his best, Ervin, like none of the others, can bear down on a witness, cutting directly to the heart of the testimony and making clear the full implications of that testimony. His dogged emphasis on the Constitution and the ways in which it has been abused by a particular witness puts the matter in its proper, sweeping perspective...
...could not read music. He hummed and whistled his tunes, and then played them by ear. One group of numbers is misty-eyed romantic, starlight-in-champagne (I'll Follow My Secret Heart, Zigeuner, Someday I'll Find You). The other group pinches a satiric nerve with droll spoofery (Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington). As a lyricist, Coward was a direct descendant of W.S. Gilbert, and in the modern musical theater only Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter were his peers...
Always an adept actor, Caine is splendid here. His King, quintessentially seedy, strikes just the proper balance between calculated mediocrity and droll detachment. As Gilbert, Mickey Rooney is equal parts Robinson, Cagney and miniature tornado. It is a broad performance, but Hodges draws firm boundaries for it, which Rooney straddles occasionally but never oversteps. The performance, like the movie itself, deserves to become some crazy kind of minor classic...
...People know I'm a Nixon man," he says. "I always have been. I guess that makes me a centrist, or just to the right of center." In a relatively humorless Administration, Safire stands out as a wit and phrasemaker. He wrote The New Language of Politics, a droll political lexicon, and is credited with coining the Agnewism "nattering nabobs of negativism...
FRENZY. Alfred Hitchcock approaches top form again with this droll little study in terror...