Word: flaccidity
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Instead of doing anything, Flynn just stands there. Meanwhile Stop Train 349, which might have made a sizzling topical melodrama, is sidetracked by flaccid direction, routine performances, and a script that turns people into points of view. The biggest jolt is pitting Errol Flynn's tall, handsome but impassive son against the Communist menace, and letting the Reds get the best of it. In this generation, Hollywood's good guys appear to be all buckle and no swash...
...grim." He admits that his "moral point of departure is a sense of outrage." His book is barbed with generalizations about "the strangest poor in the history of mankind." It suffers from poorly drawn examples that often fail to punctuate his points. It jumps with startling hyperbole and flaccid statistics; he says, for example, that there are some 50 million poor in the U.S.,* but admits this may be an exaggeration. Yet when he writes of the poor in the mass -racial minorities, urban workers dispossessed by technology, low income farmers, the aged-his indignation is moving...
...slit is closed at right angles. Such operations (there are several variants) had been around since 1886, but not until 1947 did Dr. Joseph Weinberg of the Long Beach (Calif.) VA Hospital try the promising combination of vagotomy and pyloroplasty. A vagotomy by itself tends to make the stomach flaccid so that it does not empty fast enough; opening its outlet comes close to restoring nature's timing. This approach appeals to such surgeons as Dr. Moore because it is the least mutilating of the available approaches, and a more drastic operation can still be done later if necessary...
Ionesco's Jack, or the Submission is just about as absurd as theatre gets. It alternates between caricatures and specious profundity, demanding and receiving unconvincing performances from the cast. Michael Nach is properly flaccid as Jack, a young man whose family reviles him until he declares he does like hash browned potatoes, and then tries to marry him off to Roberta, Janice Brown, a three-nosed beauty whom he finds insufficiently ugly. Miss Brown performs very well, as most of the cast seems to; "seems" because it is difficult to know exactly what the roles should be and exactly...
...lightened their essays on human folly with the inspired lunacy that makes art. Kramer offers the harshly realistic image of greed itself, and simply tops it off with wisecracks. His cast cannot match the physical style of Mack Sennett, and Mad World's substitute for wit is the flaccid humor of insult. In dozens of roadside hassles, Ethel Merman as Berle's nerve-shattering mother-in-law begins almost every sentence with "Shuddup, you big stupid idiot...