Word: formlessness
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Playwright Enid Bagnold has built her comedy on subtle dialogue and bizarre characterizations. Since she seems to believe that the soul of wit is not brevity but irrelevancy, there are some moments--especially in the first act--when the sudden monologues about plants and fertilizers make the play formless and uninteresting. But once the characterizations are well established, the playwright manages to maintain a tight, logical consistency between the fanciful lines and the equally volatile people who utter them...
Just behind the Hôtel de Ville a three-deep line of the helmeted garde mobile blocked the passage. As the marchers spread out into a formless crowd, a jauntily kepied high-ranking police officer held the anxious leaders in conversation. Then suddenly the big blue police vans roared down with reinforcements of police. Surrounded by hundreds of wellarmed, disciplined men, one thousand Algerians yielded and were trucked off to jail. Frisked (of knives, stilettos, pieces of steel) and fingerprinted for future reference, most were later released...
Doctor at Sea is a most appropriate title for this latest British contribution to broad brawl-and brothel humor. The Rankmen have wandered from the drawing room to tackle slapstick of the old formless Hollywood kind, and they seem almost as uncomfortable in this role as their earnest young doctor who is forced to cope with unreasoning sailors and voluptuous prostitutes. Given a crude genre, however, Doctor at Sea still manages to be highly amusing, to an uncritical audience...
...what they happened to be feeling in the process of painting. The results were huge canvases excitedly smeared, spattered, daubed, dribbled and gobbed with color in the shape of freewheeling overall designs, as if the artists had been playing with paints and got carried away. They were not as formless and unconsidered as the quick glance suggests, however, and they aimed for styles coherent at least to the stylists...
Libervals Y. Nationalists. The quarrel, formless at first, sharpened in recent weeks, forcing most Argentines to choose sides. By early last week the lineups were fairly well defined...