Word: humorlessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Politics can be largely personal in southern Louisiana, and on that score Watkins is a formidable opponent. He is a French Catholic whose roots reach back 150 years in his predominantly French Catholic district; his manner, relaxed and amiable, appeals to the Cajun voters. Treen, a solemn and somewhat humorless Methodist, is counting on Nixon's coattails...
...kind of Danish Willy Loman. He would like to be well-liked at Elsinore. He barely sniffs the stench of corruption at the court but is baffled by the toughness of the territory, as if it were New England. And like Willy Loman, he is virtually humorless, unable to season his despair or get a proper perspective on himself. Because he is an extravert, Keach is weakest in the soliloquies, good in all the social scenes, the guying of Polonius, and brilliant in the duel with Laertes, which for feral second-to-second menace has never been better staged...
Woody scarcely had time to enjoy his oddly luxurious surroundings. He worked, in fact, with a demonic, almost humorless passion-writing parodies and vignettes for The New Yorker, confecting new nightclub and television routines, searching vainly for the ultimate one-liner. Sporadically, he took time out to spice up campaign speeches for New York City Mayor John Lindsay. He also coauthored, directed and starred in a hilarious, self-inflicted wound of a film called Take the Money and Run. It was the first movie over which Allen had total control, and the first in which the quintessential Allen style surfaced...
...targets are routinely Shavian -English justice, hypocrisy and prudery. The comic fall guys are Arab princes. The British exploited them for empire; Shaw does it for cheap and wilted laughs. The hero is an anti-Establishment mouthpiece, a humorless pirate chief (Pernell Roberts) too tame to make the chorus line in Gilbert and Sullivan...
Consider, however, that most critical film circles in this country, given the same nominees for Best Picture, would have picked Kubrick's Clock work Orange, the most highhanded and humorless allegory since the Old Testament, and you might be won over to the Academy's way of thinking...