Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...movie isn't really an ode to romanticism; rather, it is an elegy to its passing. Cukor turns sentiment to laughter, to a capricious form of skepticism that knows "the good old days" to be illusionism. The loops of his freewheeling narrative dip eagerly into the past only to circle back a bit crestfallen. And in between, that cherished romance becomes sappy to the taste...
...anything or expect to get anywhere, but all of them are aware of a nagging, infuriating immobility. Climaxes are anticlimaxes. Precisely because life has passed Chekhov's people by, aged them, defeated them, they bear eloquent witness to how avidly men and women hunger for life. The laughter and tears in Chekhov arise from the recognized or unrecognized disparity between the life one wants and the life one gets...
...left for his new job in Washington, but as they ambled into the University Hall Faculty meeting room, they saw the former dean seated in his usual position at the right of President Bok. As usual, Dunlop was trading quips with passers-by and periodically bursting into fits of laughter, always casting a canny eye about the room to reassure himself that everything in his Faculty was in order...
...start of the meeting never deters Dunlop from continuing his performance. While Bok plays the somber straight man, Dunlop slouches in his chair, scowls disdainfully in the direction of his ever diminishing number of adversaries, only to jerk upright in paroxysms of laughter when his side scores a point. At a meeting last Fall, he and Bok disagreed over a bit of financial minutia, and when evidence corroborating his position came forth from the audience, he lurched forward chuckling, his finger waggling at the somewhat taken aback Bok. Some observers swore they saw him stick out his tongue...
Ossie Davis, L.H.D., playwright. You have brought back to the Negro theater oldfashioned, honest laughter. Gwendolyn Brooks, Lit.D., poet...