Word: humoredly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...repertory strikes a range of notes-from the wholesome humor of The Show-Off and the slightly sour satire of Pantagleize through the elegiac tones of The Cherry Orchard and the mournful wail of Exit the King...
...more important is the omnipresent hand of a born novelist, buoyantly bending and shaping each scene to his literary way, and successfully creating a single, superb, comic figure of the author himself. With a courageous measure of self-mockery, Mailer casts himself in the role of a black-humor antihero: a hard-drinking, self-important and snobbish dandy who, believing himself the star, is forever stumbling toward the camera, when all the time he is really only an extra, a bit player who will inevitably be cut out of the film...
...then goes on to bully his fellow speakers with arrogant bluster and to bawdy his audience with testy obscenity-for which he offers a spirited defense. He uses it to wake up people, he claims. Besides, he discovered in the Army that it is the common man's humor and, in a way, the voice of his history ("the truth of the way it really felt over the years passed on a river of obscenity...
Today, at 65, Wylie has lost none of his rage but all of his sense of ribaldry and humor-which puts today's youth one up on him. This tirade is directed again at humanity in general. Specifically, Wylie's complaint is that man does not live as the animal he was in tended to be; instead he has buried his natural instinct under phony shibboleths such as religion, capitalism, Communism, belief in progress and blind faith in science...
China is Near is a rare film in which art and message peacefully coexist. The hypocrisy of dishonest personal relations; ideology disappearing through compromise; these are tragic themes. But Bellochio handles them lightly, with humor, and the tragedy appears only in the interstices of laughter, gaining in nobility and significance...