Word: larkishly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other end of the scale of seriousness are two works notable for their sheer larkish effrontery. In George Baxt's The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (St. Martin's Press; 228 pages; $15.95), the ferocious actress is joined by such other real-life viragoes as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting...
...their normality, as if they were plump, middle-aged matrons nattering across a backyard fence about their ability to conjure spirits. That very perception of character seems to have guided Geraldine Page in a less malevolent but equally necromantic role, the ghost-summoning Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's larkish Blithe Spirit, which was revived on Broadway last week. The cast includes Richard Chamberlain, Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey, all in good form, but this is Page's show. In a career including eight Oscar nominations, culminating in a 1986 Best Actress award for The Trip to Bountiful, and countless...
...movies with the force of a party doll at a quilting bee. Each form cheerfully exploited the other; neither was ever quite the same. By the '60s, movies were an indispensable tool for marketing any hot new group. Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night pinned the larkish wit of four Liverpudlians on top of the world; Bob Rafelson's Head (co-written with Jack Nicholson) was a brilliant, bilious suicide note from the Monkees to their die-hard fans. Today rock helps sell nonrock pictures from Top Gun to Rocky IV. But it took David Byrne to bring...
...solemnity. As the heir to the throne exchanged troths with a bashful girl just past her teens, it seemed that Prince Charming rode with Sleeping Beauty in a coach of glass. When Charles' younger brother and Diana's fourth cousin wed last week, it was a jollier occasion, a larkish high-society romance scripted by P.G. Wodehouse. No foreign heads of state were present, and no national holiday was declared. Instead, the abbey was full of family and friends, there to celebrate Queen and country and witness the perfect match of two frolicsome young people. The < royal family are royals...
...this score, Absolute Beginners is a pretty little cheat. It promises a larkish tour of London in 1958, the year Britain discovered both rock 'n' roll as an anarchic force and teenagers as a voracious new consumer class. Colin (Eddie O'Connell) is a bright lad who hits the Top 40 of success snapping pictures of mods and trads; Suzette (Patsy Kensit) is a proto-Twiggy fashion model- designer. Sade, Ray Davies and the snakily elegant David Bowie appear in elaborate production numbers--upmarket rock videos, really--and Julien Temple, a master director of the short music form, revs...