Word: droll
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bloody well develop it. And so he does in the course of this minor, deft, deliciously droll and sometimes startlingly profound little novel by P. H. Newby (The Barbary Light, Revolution and Roses), the most ingenious and beguiling Puck to appear on the scene since Henry Green came popping out of the all-too-hollow log of contemporary English literature...
Irony is the keynote to this droll, dry novel. In it Author Sheed, book editor and drama critic for Commonweal, continues the dissection of contemporary life that he began in The Hack. The book is overlong, as though Author Sheed feared that the reader would not easily take his point; and only its protagonist comes vividly to life. But in its cool compassion and amused impatience with self-deceit, it is a perceptive guidebook through the wilds of a modern marriage...
...FASCIST. Italian history is wryly spoofed in the conflict between a Blackshirt corporal (Ugo Tognazzi) and the droll philosopher (Georges Wilson) whom he must steer through retreating Germans, invading Allies, and other perils common to the peninsula...
...help plan the ideal courtyard for his wasted bronze figures, which today are in the open air looking like ghosts out for a stroll. Alexander Calder contributed a 41-ton stabile, a great black dog, for the front yard. Miró filled his section, a rock-wall garden, with droll ceramics, one a giant egg nesting in a quiet pond. And in typically glad ribbons of red, green and blue, Chagall laid out his first mosaic...
...Hallelujah Trail is bigger but not better than any of the recent comedies that are supposed to milk laughs from the sacred cows of the Hollywood western. The sheer bulk of the opus is one clue to its failure. Given a plot with several droll twists, Director John Sturges (The Great Escape, Bad Day at Black Rock) lets his camera roam freely over the Cinerama landscape, too often striving for epic effects when antic effects are needed...