Word: impish
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...scheming sons of Alfred Hitchcock. With Sisters and Dressed to Kill, De Palma made his reputation as the Psycho student supreme, drawing curlicues of style and cheerfully obscene graffiti in the margins of that seminal horror-movie text. In Phantom of the Paradise and Home Movies, he displayed an impish, impudent sense of humor that recalls Hitchcock's macabre comedy The Trouble with Harry. But the most passionate Brian De Palma-and maybe the real one-is the child of Vertigo, Hitchcock's essay on the fatal power of obsessive love. In plot skeleton and flesh tones...
...earlier, more impish days, TIME, inspired by Homer's "wine-dark sea," fastened labels on everything in sight and endlessly repeated them. New York's mayor was always "fireplug-shaped Fiorello La Guardia"; the city's newspaper, in a phrase that combined admiration with gentle sarcasm, was "the good gray New York Times." So familiar was this practice that Johnny Mercer parodied it in a Broadway show tune, Affable, Balding Me. TIME'S double-barreled labels came to a quiet end when a later managing editor, T.S. Matthews, forbade the use of them unless a writer...
...Jenny Cornuelle, a most impudently regal actress, is a flashing, mesmerizing Sultan. Maybe best of all is the Princess of Bonnie Zimmering, who has never seemed as exquisitely sculpted, as delicately, opalescently winsome; she has developed a sly and bewitching way of infusing her lines with a touch of impish satire. In the large supporting cast, Sarah Sewall, Martha Hackett and Philip Pitha contribute especially fine bits...
...rake of renown, Plume stirs the love of Silvia (Laurie Kennedy), who disguises herself in male uniform and eventually hooks him. Plume's best friend, Mr. Worthy (Frank Maraden), is led a mad matrimonial chase by a haughty heiress named Melinda, played in an impish comic vein by Laura Esterman. Bumpkins, worldlings, gulls and wits populate the evening. Toward the end of the play, it becomes evident that Plume is not a womanizing gourmand, as he pretends to the world, but a moonstruck child of sentiment who has found in the chaste but frolicsome Silvia his true heart...
When he launches into one of his droll, deadpan stories, Brady's Buddha-like face tries to conceal an impish grin, with all the success of a novice poker player hiding a royal flush. He relishes answering questions by formulating quotable one-liners and piling adjectives upon metaphors. Occasionally, when he crosses the line from irrepressibility to irreverence, Brady gets into trouble. Once, aboard the campaign plane as it flew over a Louisiana forest fire, he gleefully shouted: "Killer trees! Killer trees!" The reference to Reagan's campaign gaffe about the contribution of trees to air pollution grounded...