Word: humorlessness
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...barfly, leans archly on an emblematic umbrella, stickles an uncertain industrialist with the crack: "With your genius for sitting on either side of the fence, you ought to be in the Government." As upsetting to Scotland Yard tradition as he is to the belief that the British are essentially humorless, Actor Richardson seemed the likeliest character yet to carry on for justice in cinema since Bulldog Drummond got into the Grade...
...spots. Mrs. Lowell was kind, looked after the Goritzins in illness, raised their wages to $200 a month, reluctantly let them go when she moved into a house that was too big for them to manage. The rest of Service Entrance is a chronicle-somewhat humorless, written in upstairs rather than backstairs English-of abuse, exploitation, wretched servants' quarters, meals on leftovers, petty impositions, large-scale cheating. (Young Mr. Carter, a febrile, Napo-Iconic financier, was the most egregious character of the lot: though he was rich enough to keep a yacht, he diddled the Goritzins...
...raised over the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains. . . ." Even his calculations were naive and almost innocent, as when he stealthily evaded the War Department when he took a howitzer (for which he had no use) on his third expedition to the West. Courageous, spirited, good-humored and humorless, he seems in Allan Nevins' big (649-page), definitive biography to have been somehow distracted-like an actor who pulls the trigger but the pistol does not go off, or like a leading man who launches his great scene before the curtain rises...
...Darling Daughter (Warner Bros.) is an adaptation of Mark Reed's mildly sophisticated, mildly amusing play about a humorless young couple who enjoy an earnest week-end together before getting married. Three weeks ago the New York State Board of Censors banned the movie. Last week, the Board of Regents rescinded the ban and Warner Bros., eager to capitalize on the publicity, hurried it simultaneously into Manhattan's Strand and Globe Theatres. Critics and audiences found it mildly sophisticated, mildly amusing...
That Elizabeth Madox Roberts was lost in one of these treacherous literary culs-de-sac became painfully clear to most critics three years ago, when she published her obscure, mystical novel, He Sent Forth a Raven. A difficult, humorless book, it had nothing of the earthiness and quiet backwoods simplicity that made her first novel, The Time of Man, a best-seller and a critic's favorite. Instead of plain Kentucky hill folks, its characters were strange, unreal philosophers who explained at great length, in highly polished sentences, that they did not know what it was all about...