Word: magicianly
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...audience, than better artists would dare require. Reality is as much his deadly enemy as it is the superior artist's most difficult love affair. At his best, Saroyan is a wonderfully sweet-natured, witty and beguiling kind of Christian anarchist, and so apt a lyrical magician that the magic designed for one medium still works in another. At his worst, he is one of the world's ranking contenders for brassy, self-pitying, arty mawkishness, for idealism with an eye to the main chance, for arrogant determination to tell damnably silly lies in the teeth...
...achieve much lyrical eloquence when silence is almost as taboo on the screen as in radio. The role of the heroine would have been an ideal light workout for an actress of great sensitivity: Garbo, for instance. Miss Fontaine is intelligent and industrious, but she is never a magician. Since nearly 90% of the picture depends on her, the whole show suffers accordingly. Louis Jourdan is more convincing in his easier role. Letter is a good try, but a disappointing film...
...poet who perhaps came closest to succeeding was 68-year-old Wallace Stevens, a Hartford insurance man, in his latest book, Transport to Summer. W. H. Auden, an intellectual acrobat and a verbal magician, turned out 1947's most discussed book of verse: The Age of Anxiety. This modern eclogue described a chance meeting of four paper-thin characters in a Third Avenue bar; its moral was ex-radical Auden's glowing belief that worldly goods must be rejected. The verse itself was dexterous, bright but self-indulgent...
...cannot avoid it. He gets into the same scrapes, has the same adventures with women. By the time he again meets Zinaida he has forgotten that he ever met her. The story repeats itself down to the last detail-until, once again, he finds himself visiting the magician. But when he reaches the point of asking the magician to send him back, he suddenly remembers everything...
...Hindu belief. Westerners are apt to find it a hypothesis out of all proportion to the evidence: the occasional human sensation that "I have been here before." A more common and much stronger sensation is that of free will, which the "wheel" denies. In Osokin's tale, the magician's demands resemble the Christian requisites for salvation...