Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When homespun Kentucky Poet Jesse Stuart sat down and wrote a big stack of "sonnets ' (Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow -TIME, Oct. 15, 1934), a few critics sat up, called him a modern Bobbie Burns. Others just laughed at his unconscious, bull-tongued humor. Last week Poet Stuart made the scoffers scratch their heads over a book of stones that were partly funny, partly serious, in the main tantalizingly good. These tales of Kentucky farmers were written in racy Kentucky dialect, with a wild-eyed, straightforward outrageousness that reminded readers more than once of Erskine Caldwell, at times...
...sculptress. When throbbing in response to some dramatic situation, her voice rises to a rather unpleasant shrillness, but what is lost in euphony is probably gained in realism. Paul Killiam, Jr. is splendid as one of the companion medical students, a primitive fellow with a rare good humor and a tremendous appetite for the frivolities. And so on through the rest in the cast: Isabella Gardner, John Flower, Alfonse Ossorio, Paul Sturges, and John Barnard; they're all uniformly good...
...dialogue is effectively simple. There is little originality, and such familiar episodes as the avowal by the lovers that fate has meant them for each other, appear in this play. But they are handled, by playwrights and players, with a vitalizing skill. Neither is there much outright humor. The comic relief consists mainly in the mundane or drunken suties of Mr. Killiam and the unaccountable tricks of the man who works the lights. Thus all contributes to the winningly unpretentious impression that "The Wind and the Rain" imparts...
That, with wise direction, he can achieve something beyond the manly muteness on which his reputation as an actor has hitherto reposed, Gary Cooper recently proved in the Frank Borzage-Ernst Lubitsch Desire. Herein he gives further evidence of a sense of humor, thereby helps its authors and an expert cast make Mr. Deeds Goes to Town altogether worthwhile entertainment...
...well have been set in a good second-rate apartment hotel on Park Avenue. In this sense, indeed, it is a universal work, and while he should have been casting the spell of poverty and misery, he lets his love of dialogue run away from him, and the momentary humor of back talk of somewhat Chick Salian hue masks the enduring tragedy of the problem under discussion...