Word: humorously
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fernandel's black cassock, appearing in yet another film, might seem to have worn threadbare. But his religious mimicry and lugubrious countenance are still hilarious. The fantastic creatures which surround him, however, and the macabre tone of The Red Inn combine to muffle his easy-going humor...
...guests. In the process, Fernandel must make some very difficult decisions: whether to eat or give confession to a dying woman and whether to risk his life to save those of the unwitting travellers. In the end, other people make these decisions for him. But this merely enhances the humor...
Academy of the Left. Among those who have kept their sense of balance and humor in criticizing the advance guard is Worcester Art Museum Director Francis Henry Taylor. In his role of judge, the critic must, like any judge, rely very largely upon precedent, as Taylor does when he complains that the advance guard has ceased to communicate with ordinary men. "Not until the second quarter of the 20th century," he points out, "was the essential communicability of art ever denied . . . The one and only quality denied to a work of art throughout the ages is privacy. Unless participation...
...will envelop them in a fine steam bath of banalities, in strong but clotted family feelings. Given a really sharp situation, such as Jerry's family met in a conclave over his possible marriage, and Chayefsky can orchestrate it-and Joshua Logan conduct it-with precise, phonographic humor. But the strong point of the playwright becomes the weak point of the play: the small talk and small talkers seem mere padding that not so much interrupts a vibrant story as substitutes...
...flies to watch them squirm, but in place of flies, the playwright looks at people trapped in their own moral degeneracy. This process is hardly a pleasant one, yet in The Rose Tattoo, Williams very skillfully adapts it to the purposes of comedy. It is not a kind of humor, though, that will give an audience a feeling of lighthearted pleasure--it is sweaty and intense and at times almost brutal...