Word: humorless
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Buster Keaton, utterly wasted in one brief sequence, might have told Director Kramer a thing or two about the shrewd use of slapstick to coax belly laughs from an episode that has three comedians tearing down a garage with all the deadly, humorless efficiency of a professional demolition crew. Cutting from incident to incident, car to car, ground to air, the film dissipates its fun at every turn, and the only chase to build up steam is a Chase named Barrie, who dances a wicked deadpan twist. Mad World reaches its nadir with an abortive climax that puts Spencer Tracy...
Into this seemingly doomed situation stepped a scholarly, introverted and humorless man of 53, whose major qualification for the job was that he was one of the few South Viet Nam leaders who had not already failed. A convinced nationalist and an intense Roman Catholic, Ngo Dinh Diem came from a mandarin family long accustomed to rule. Diem himself nearly became a priest but decided against it because, says his brother, Archbishop Thuc, "the church was too worldly...
...Hero to Emulate. He is Belgian-born Georges Schoeters, 33, a nervous, myopic member of the FLQ's five-man "leadership committee." Husky and humorless, Schoeters (he pronounces it scooters) arrived from Belgium in 1951, telling stories of how he was a teen-age partisan against the Nazis in World War II. With the help of a sympathetic University of Montreal sociology professor, he quickly learned English, then entered the university to study economics. All went well for a while until he suffered a nervous breakdown from which, as one friend said, he emerged with a "terrific instability...
...Historian Malcolm Elwin doubts that she was what went wrong with the marriage. In this first study of the subject based on "unrestricted use of the Lovelace Papers," the famous collection of family letters and documents, Elwin concludes that the real villain was more probably Annabella herself. A quiet, humorless, literal-minded girl, she took all of Byron's Gothic romancing with impenetrable solemnity. For a man like Byron, thinks Elwin, the temptation to pile extravagance on extravagance must have been almost irresistible once he found an audience that responded to his frequent, mysterious allusions to "atrocious crimes...
High Time. That seemed to be the plank that interested Peralta the most. An austere, humorless man who goes to mass regularly, he has a record unblemished by any flirtation with the left, and his open affection for the U.S. was cemented during a 1940 tour of defense pests as the guest of then Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. "That was a magnificent trip." Peralta remembers. Selecting his Cabinet last week, he stuck strictly to anti-Communists but chose a majority of civilians. Peralta's Treasury Minister announced plans to cut down on the budget deficit, fire featherbedding...