Word: oafish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This plodding historical novel may possibly go like wildfire in the lending libraries, or even in Hollywood. The married life of long-suffering Alis and oafish Ansiau is described in great, sometimes tedious detail. Miss Oldenbourg's canvas is wide but her stitches are painstakingly small. Heroine Alis settles down to yearly pregnancies, frequent miscarriages, and incessant worries about the financial decline of the manor, the fruits of which her self-indulgent husband squanders on pomp, tournaments and the Crusades. Before old age, each has one fierce extramarital fling -and two bastards are added to the brood of infants...
...Ideal Husband (London Film; 20th Century-Fox) is not one of Oscar Wilde's best plays, but it has enough edge and style to make the run of plays look oafish. Alexander Korda's screen production of it is short of ideal, but it is distinctly something to see and hear...
...full stature as clowns. When the script is on their side, as in a lampoon of one of those Mr.-&-Mrs.-at-Breakfast radio programs, the Hartmans can be extremely funny. Grace's flat voice and frozen facial muscles are a perfect foil for her husband's oafish ardors and accomplished gaucherie...
...heroine of Therese is mired in a tight bourgeois world of money, damp country houses and spiritual smugness. Bored with her oafish husband, she tries to poison him. The poison plot is discovered and the husband recovers. Therese is kicked out and sent to Paris, where Author Mauriac harrowingly portrays her disintegration. Like all his sinners, she tries to repent. A confession scene in which Therese was absolved, says Mauriac, was torn up, because "I could not see the priest who would have possessed the qualifications necessary if he was to hear her confession with understanding...
Good fun: the oafish, back-country bears who watch the Bongo triangle square itself. Top-drawer Disney: various dreamlike bits of flowing, beautifully planned motion (notably Bongo's love-dream and the climax of his fight); the marvelously oily thrusting and gropings of the magical plant as it grows & grows through the night; Donald's transcendent Moscow-Arty performance as a medieval duck driven mad by malnutrition...