Word: knockabouts
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...first-class barroom talker, which Robert Ruark is, needs a knockabout past, a creative memory, sufficient humor to see the vanity of his inventions, and a delivery good enough to shield from his listeners the gravy stains on material, memory and wit. With this equipment, a talker who happens to be, say, a journalist, can Jang out a newspaper column for years in an average daily elapsed time of eleven minutes (so Newspaperman Ruark has coasted; one suspects the creative memory is an aid in recounting the feat). Or he can put together two volumes of yarns about his boyhood...
...Rhinoceros is far too long in making its point. Actually the play is much better farce than satire. The pandemonium of the first rhinoceros scares, the hurly-burly of the mounting rhinoceros fever, the sight of Actor Zero Mostel virtually turning into a rhinoceros right onstage, are all good knockabout fun. And the dialogue throws darts into a variety of human rationalizations and cliches...
...Sundowners. When not upstaged by dingoes, wombats, endless flocks of sheep and Peter Ustinov, Stars Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr are appropriately knockabout as a shiftless couple beating the Australian bush...
...that of a literary acrobat cockily performing newly-learned tricks and listening slyly for applause. In one neon-streaked passage, Durrell preens so obviously that his arrogant virtuosity is amusing: "I question myself eagerly. Is this amusia, aphasia, agraphia, alexia. abulia? It is life.''* The narrator, a knockabout literary sort named Lawrence Lucifer, gloats over sex, happily flexes his ability to shock ("I am afraid to shake hands with him, for fear that the skin will slip the bony structure of the hand and come away. It would take so little to produce the skeleton from this debile...
...leaped spectacularly into the public eye in Captain Blood, and was well away on a film career that made him a sort of "rich man's Roy Rogers" whose color spectacles were almost as popular as the off-color spectacle of his private life. The lusty, naive young knockabout from New Guinea became the bored Mocambohemian. "The Baron," as his buddies called him, built the usual $125,000 mansion and kept a yacht, filled both of them with "roisterers, fun guys, rompers" and the sort of girls they liked to romp with. To the pressagents' delight, he became...