Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Being 90 is a bore," says Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She pulls a twisted ivory narwhal tusk (a gift from Rear Admiral Peary) from a corner of her drawing room, brandishes it like a spear, strikes a Brunhilde pose-then roars with laughter at her performance, flashing an abundance of Roosevelt teeth. At 90, she is as defiantly unconventional as she was in the opening years of the century, when the nation was never sure whether to be delighted or mortified by her then shocking antics-donning riding breeches, driving an automobile, smoking cigarettes, jumping fully clothed into a swimming pool...
...Herblock and the Los Angeles Times's Paul Conrad, Wright is now one of the nation's most widely published editorial cartoonists. Whether he is shown carrying on both ends of a phone conversation (and listening in on earphones in the middle) or provoking hysterical laughter in a Martian seeking earth's leader, Wright's Nixon is an unvarying emblem of sinister paranoia or clownish ineptitude...
...only laughter here comes screaming out at you like wild hyenas, as in this segment from "Why Can't I Leave...
...into rhino. But the control that Brustein admired is not so apparent under O'Horgan's direction. Mostel, unchecked and unchallenged, easily skids into self-parody. Still, his billowing, bellowing metamorphosis into another member of the herd does provide the movie's only moments of real laughter, fleeting as they are, and as desperately uncomfortable as Mostel seems...
...People go to the movies for three reasons," Friedkin says, "to laugh, to cry, or to be frightened." But The Exorcist is too framed to be frightening, too mechanical for tears; the only laughter it triggers is defensive. The movie puts a tight lid on your ability to think or feel. It won't let you get close enough to care about it--it is always on the attack. Little Regan just gets filthier and filthier and when she's exorcized the movie has to end because it took all its bang from the fake effects Regan gets so foul...