Word: rueful
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...head grifter is Sydney Chaplin, who acts as if he were carved in lard. Love sets in when a raven-haired newsgal (Carol Lawrence) starts sharing Chaplin's bench in search of a story. They are a rueful twosome, about as happy as a pair of viruses. Actress Lawrence's musicomedy gifts are under smothering wraps, and the only unwrapped presents of the evening are Orson Bean and Phyllis Newman. Fighting hotel-room eviction by wearing nothing but a towel (they can't throw her out nude), Comedienne Newman has one of the two numbers that threaten...
...faith that all Christians, including Roman Catholics, must eventually unite gives his life a clear direction. It is a just barely permissible joke among his closest friends to call Visser 't Hooft "the Protestant Pope." He replies with a wintry "I'm not infallible"-which is a rueful recognition that his job is touchy and hard, but also a proud admission that he has succeeded in shaping the World Council into an important organization...
...built a reputation on lonesco-like one-acters, of which The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith are now on view. Also recommended: Hedda Gabler, with Anne Meacham doing Ibsen to the hilt-and Under Milk Wood, a fine performance of Dylan Thomas' ribald and rueful elegy to a little Welsh town...
Much of the dialogue rings with alliterative beauty. Satan coaxes Eve to "Bite on boldly be not abashed"; Eve echoes to Adam, "Bite on boldly," and rueful Adam grieves that he has betrayed God and "Broken his bidding bitterly...
...Harold's Teeth. A New Yorker editor for the past 25 years, William Maxwell, 52, writes with more than a trace of the rueful resignation and wry disenchantment of much New Yorker fiction. His massive restraint sometimes brings his narrative to a dead halt; his quietness of tone sometimes verges on the inaudible. He can reduce the bone-wearying comic horrors of travel to a sentence as when Harold Rhodes, burdened with two lead-weight suitcases, just makes a train: "The station agent took their tickets gravely from between Harold's teeth." He has not created profound characters...