Word: eggs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gillian Freeman, who is quite literate, is a writer in the Austen tradition. With its gothic surprise ending and all, the plot of An Easter Egg Hunt could be summarized in a couple of lines. Yet Freeman does more than merely tell a story. She re-creates an era. The story is set in the famed English countryside, during World War I. The Great War intrudes on the narrative no more than it intrudes on the small girls' school in which the action transpires. Tightened food supplies and army cadets training nearby are the only evidence in the girls' little...
Everywhere, Warner casts her spell, literally. Her mother's ritual for boiling an egg becomes just that. In a piece on folk recipes-a pint of warm beer stirred with a hot poker will cure backache, a slab of raw beef will rub away a wart-the reporter edges deliciously close to magic herself. Even the inventory of the purple velvet handbag of Mme. Houdin, ten-year-old Sylvia's French tutor, becomes a litany of talismans to ward off disaster: smelling salts, two thimbles, a photograph of M. Houdin, the number of madame's life-insurance...
...however, strongly support Hume's greatness on the ground that the force of his personality definitely affected the age in which he lived. It is not a question of the cart before the horse in either case, merely the old problem of which came first, the chicken or the egg. In any case, there is much to be said on both sides...
...paparazzi, on the private lives of all creatures great and small. Probably never has any program shown so many forms of courtship and copulation: millipedes writhing in combinations too complicated to comprehend, goggle-eyed newts climbing atop each other, fish defying the hazards of nature to bring sperm to egg, frogs singing hoarse epithalamiums in ponds and swamps. Only fast-flying swifts, which mate on the wing, seem able to escape the prying lens...
...much unfettered mirth here from the rest of the Warner menagerie: from Bugs, the Cagney of lagomorphs, who plays Galahad and slickshooter to the splenetic Yosemite Sam in two of the best shorts (Knighty Knight Bugs, Wild and Woolly Hare); from the hugely talented Daffy Duck as a reluctant egg layer (Golden Yeggs); from Granny, Tweety Pie and a sternutating dragon. Freleng is no match for the great cartoon directors, Chuck Jones (Road Runner) and Tex Avery (Droopy Dog). Still, there are more than enough in-spite-of-yourself laughs in these 80 minutes to guarantee a happy Saturday matinee...