Word: humorless
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...well justified, for the structure of the novel emerges all the more clearly. With considerable skill, he balances Mrs. Morel's almost morbid domination of Paul's sensitive and passionate nature with the physical inhibitions produced in Miriam by her mother's puritanical beliefs. The novel is rather humorless; Cardiff creates several badly needed moments of comic relief--such as an address from a stout suffragette. Most important, he never loses sight of Mrs. Morel; her influence pervades the film at every turn...
Crossing from Austria into Yugoslavia differs little from crossing any other Western European boundary. True, there is a double border, one for passport inspection, one for customs; and the customs official, a ruddy man with an immense fur overcoat and Russian style hat, is even more humorless than his American counterpart. This particular one showed no response whatsoever to one tourist's pathetic attempts to cope with a Serbo-Croatian customs form, though his stoniness did finally soften when another tourist requested extra stamps for her passport. For a moment, he relaxed his suspicious glare, smiled, and stamped her passport...
...Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sang Don Giovanni brilliantly, but the wildest cheers of its 15-minute ovation were for Ebert. The following night new Director Gustav Rudolf Sellner was not so lucky. He bowed in with avant-garde Composer Giselher Klebe's new opera, Alkmene, an academic, humorless scoring of the ribald Amphitryon legend, in which that incorrigible old satyr Jupiter turns himself into Amphitryon's double to woo Amphitryon's handsome wife...
...direction is sometimes downright amateur. He repeatedly misplaces his camera and clumsily misdirects his actors. He cannot rattle Actor March, who after a career of 33 years and 65 films stands almost without rival as a creative cinemactor. But the director thoroughly demoralizes Actor Gazzara-at best a humorless performer, he seems in this role to think of himself as a sort of galling Dr. Killjoy. Disk Jockey Dick Clark, who plays an intern in The Young Doctors, reads the lines with his usual fishy smile and oily mikeside manner. He obviously imagines that a medical man is just another...
...know how to talk to boys." The boys are usually busy talking to a pet moose or rocketing off to the moon. But at least, the cautionary yarns of the brush-your-teeth-or-mommy-won't-love-you variety seem to be on the wane. So are humorless educative nip-ups of the A-is-for-aspidistra, B-is-for-bathy-sphere order...