Word: humoredly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Happy City. In the early years of the revolution, Havana retained much of its irrepressible, boisterous humor. Four years after Castro, the place still bustled, its hundreds of bars thronged with noisy knots of people guffawing over the latest rumors, its streets snarled with ill-tempered, horn-honking traffic jams. Today there are hardly any rumors, and the streets are so empty that even impoverished La Paz, Bolivia, teems with traffic by comparison. The armed militiamen and -women once standing guard in truculent excitement before virtually every public building have disappeared. Life has become predictable, its Latin impulse governed...
...takes a rabbit's severed head to work in her purse. The real and the unreal merge, and soon her human victims appear. The first is a suitor (John Fraser) whose conventional acts of gallantry lead to a gruesome end. Later an indignant landlord (played with mordant, bumbling humor by Patrick Wymark) comes to collect his rent and lingers to try his luck. Right up to the grisly climax, the audience seldom wonders what will happen, but endures agonies as to how and when...
...with a stranger. So is his quiet exultation when he accompanies his father to the wineshop where former friends awkwardly welcome him back to the company of men. All of it seems familiar, all of it quickened by a thorny sense of truth. Railroad Man lacks the robust, abrasive humor of his later films, but it demonstrates that in 1956 Germi was already a major talent...
Peering through the mayhem is Richard Lester, a director whose style perfectly fits the Beatles' humor--fast-moving, irreverent, surprisingly low key. Although no scene is more than a minute long, and the dialogue is always rapid, there's no tension, just excitement. Lester keeps you aware of the fun he's having in playing with colors, with camera angles, with special effects, and he keeps you interested not only in what the Beatles are going to do, but also in what he's going...
...made up of very short scenes like blackout sketches and several longer set pieces (such as the already-famous one in which Colin, Tom, and Nancy push, paddle, and ride a Victorian wrought-iron bed through London). To a wild, try-anything-a-couple-of-times sense of humor Lester brings an understated visual style. What might be unbearably corny in other hands scores through its restraint. Nancy, for example, seeks directions from a surveyor as he positions an assistant carrying the sighting pole, and as the surveyor gestures vigorously the second man sidles over into an open sidewalk elevator...