Word: jovialness
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Doctor in the House (J. Arthur Rank; Republic) is a delightful example of formaldehyde humor, the kind of grisly, hospital-corridor hilarity that makes a patient wonder, in the darkness of the night, if that jovial doctor of his really understands that a man's only liver is a very serious organ...
Beneath Miller's jovial tone, it is not difficult to sense the horror that he saw in the war. When he was in Japan in 1952 for a summer seminar, he recalls the "moving and pathetic" there days at Hiroshima. "It was hard explaining," he recalls, "why you take their guns and ships and tanks away and then five years later you urge them to rearm. It just seemed inconsistent." Perhaps he was thinking of this paradox when he later wrote for The Atlantic: ". . . vast segments of our people are . . . devouring treatises on peace of mind, when everbody knows there...
...Jovial, yet profoundly serious, Perry Miller is a man of contrasts. Still the actor--he is narrating a program on WGBH; still the wanderer--he was at the Institute of Advance Study at Princeton last year, where he met and admired Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer; still the liberator and still the scholar, the tall, white-haired, intense professor, is more than anything else, a happy Puritan...
...movie's best single performance, though, is by the supporting actor who plays the town clerk. Sitting in his store and cheating at checkers all day, he contributes a jovial ghoulishness that contrasts ideally with Robinson's deadpan variety...
Where Odets wanders is in his straining for gags and an over-reliance on Skulnik's complete mastery of inflection and gesture. Strangely, the play's main strength, a warm and jovial view of Noah's relationship with God, is too often stretched to the point of flippancy and slightly cheapens Skulnik's part, as well as the play as a whole. But this defect just puts The Flowering Peach a degree below superlative, it doesn't destroy its advanced merit. Berta Gerson, as Noah's wife, almost matches Skulnik's expertness, and Mario Alcalde should grow into...