Word: merriment
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sharp Look. In his crisply written trilogy, Waugh seems to be turning back from the mannered romanticism of Brideshead Revisited. But this is not the exuberant young cynic of Decline and Fall, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust; sophistication has been supplanted by weary wisdom, not-so-innocent merriment by middle-aged melancholy. The upperclass war the trilogy chronicles-in bars and blackouts, billets and beds-will for many bear only a limited resemblance to any real war they knew or imagined. Its dialogue is so Britishly British that it is bound to set some New World teeth...
...Belle Américaine (Continental) is the latest French offering for motor-minded moviegoers: a souped-up export model, skaty-eight sillynders and loaded with hi-octane hilarity, that despite occasional wheezes will undoubtedly transport hordes of moviegoers with merriment. At the wheel is Robert Dhéry, a 40-year-old writer-director whose Broadway revue of 1958, La Plume de Ma Tante, is still humming along on the road. If he rolls on at this rate, he will soon be giving the incomparable Jacques Tati (Mr. Hulot's Holiday) a run for the funny money...
...children giggled, knowing that even in a fairy tale no one would be so foolish as to put on a tariff to offset a subsidy to offset a price support. But their daddy did not join in their merriment, for he knew that the tale he told actually happened in John F. Kennedy's Washington last week...
Julie Harris brings an entire patois of peasant gestures to her role, including a session of silently mouthing something like the Marseillaise when the wheels of justice grind too slowly. Even when the script asks to be played by leer, her gamin charm turns it into innocent merriment, as when she mimics her active lover: "He'd just tear and rip every which way, and I hate sewing." But there are always traces of the Harris poignance, a little girl lost and a trifle afraid, waking up in beds she never made...
...course, Fair Harvard. The Harvard accompanists, Richard Wilson and Dennis Duffala, seemed to be enjoying it as much as anyone else-and why not? It was the night before a big game, good feeling was, for the moment, running high, and mellifluous musics could not but add to the merriment. The combat was still a day off, and for the evening at any rate, harmony could prevail...