Word: maniac
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...deprive someone who has not yet read it of all desire to do so." Third, the romantic novelist, whose "happy hunting ground is the field of unanswerable questions, particularly if they concern the private lives of the authors." Finally, Auden says, "jolliest of them all is the maniac. The commonest of his kind is the man who believes that poetry is written in cyphers... My favorite is the John Bellendon Kerr who set out to prove that English nursery rhymes were originally written in a form of Old Dutch invented by himself...
...must tell President Muffley what Ripper "went and did." Scott's lines are outrageously funny, but the "Strangelove" script gives him little lee-way to improvise. About half-way through the picture, farce submerges all the intricacy Scott has infused into Turgidson. The character ends a near raving maniac, reflecting the general entropy that is engulfing the War Room...
...rough-textured dialogue is delivered by a cast of pros. "You're a sex maniac," purrs Edie Adams laconically, as McQueen ogles her thigh. His approach varies little, for it needs no improvement. Later, getting a clear fix on Natalie's decolletage, he makes a pass in the offhand manner of a man who takes his love the way most people take after-dinner mints. But Actress Wood matches McQueen quip for quip, twitch for twitch, shrug for shrug, smile for winning smile. Both coruscate with the sparkly stuff of which movie stars are made, and their final...
Dead-End Streets. Oswald was no raving maniac. Various neighbors, past and present, described him as seeming reasonably intelligent, although generally silent to the point of acting contemptuous. "We finally quit saying good morning to him," said one, "because he would never answer." Said another: "He treated us like we were garbage." More than anything else, Oswald's life was one of heading almost masochistically down dead-end streets...
...Maniac is good clean sadism that seldom falters until the final frames, when the fun is diluted in a 3.2 Hitchcock solution. A chase through an underground quarry might have worked out fine for Alfred, but this shock show scores highest when it is being its unpredictable self...