Word: perfection
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...liquor-laden lawman, Mitchum is a perfect foil for Wayne, although only the lopsided length of their roles keeps Arthur Hunnicutt, one of the best character actors in Hollywood, from stealing the film. In a script full of raucous frontier humor, the most amusing scene slyly comments on the state of the western today. At the fadeout, Wayne has been pinked in the knee, Mitchum in the thigh. With crutches as swagger sticks, they limp triumphantly past the camera-two old pros demonstrating that they are better on one good leg apiece than most of the younger stars...
...only going through the motions. Even Laurence Senelick's lines, which he lets go with a luscoius roll, somehow land with a clunk. Bea Paipert makes a very funny cow of an old lady, Kathryn Walker gives a droll, nasal performance of a declining aristocrat, and Tom Jones is perfect as a timid schoolteacher. But Director George Hamlin's overall pace is funeral, and most of the performances lack snap. The audience, however, seemed to enjoy the same mechanical trick of "getting sick" five or six times...
...begin at the beginning, we come in and see black and steel wreckage, rising to the flys in perfect proportions, a portrait of desolation. The orchestra--tympani, an organ, and an electric guitar--play a Greek sounding overture, a mixture of sirtaki and danse macabre...
...principals hardly do the lines justice, but many of the secondaries do. Lawrence Senelick has studied his Pistols and Shallows until he has assembled the whole bag of Shakespearean character tricks, and he executes them perfectly. John Lithgow makes an engaging brother to Tom Jones, who carries off the villain's part with great authority. And Sheila Hart, if she would sharpen her diction a bit, would make a perfect world-weary mother...
...view of events, as a member of the government and as a backbencher, is middle-distance only, and so not always in perfect focus. The editor's footnotes correct the record where Sir Har old's information was faulty, or where a dinner anecdote is constructed out of whole tablecloth. But the diarist's perceptions of people, from Churchill to De Gaulle to a rising Tory named Harold Macmillan, are always close-up and marvelously crisp and sharp. And the mood of an embattled nation is mirrored in all its nuances through the changing fortunes...