Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...HAND FOR THE LITTLE LADY. Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward and Jason Robards head the cast of a rowdy indoor western about a high-stakes poker session. Only a sympathetic trick ending flaws Director Fielder Cook's shrewd blending of hot hands and ham instincts...
...never been easy. Nearly 100 years ago, Walt Whitman, in his eccentric language, urged America to "eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables." The myths and fables, the romantic dreams as well as the shrewd half truths of colonial times, firmly established a belief in the impenetrable differentness of Asia. The situation was not helped by the fact that Asia itself had produced strikingly little written history. Today growing numbers of Americans have firsthand knowledge of how Asians think and feel, act and react -even though such knowledge is always beset by the danger of oversimplification. Diplomats, soldiers, businessmen, journalists...
...other acquaintances, Marion is kooky like a fox. A shrewd art spotter (and haggler), she has furnished their $150,000, twelve-room Park Avenue coop with a couple of Venards, a Man Ray sculpture, a Guardi, a Pol Bury kinetic, a Yaacov Agam (her newest and proudest acquisition), and some superlative samples of pop and op.*In the library of the Javitses' Park Avenue place there also hangs a striking, feline oil of Marion by Boris Chaliapin. The mouth is sensual and slightly parted, the eyes tigerish and burning bright. But why, the startled subject asked on seeing the finished...
Actors are the whole show, and shrewd Producer-Director Fielder Cook simply collects a boodle of famous and not-so-famous faces in a smoke-filled room, leaving the rest to hot hands and ham instincts. In a plot that tingles with incentives, "the five richest men in the territory" converge on a poky frontier town for their annual poker classic. An Indian massacre would probably cause less excitement, certainly less fanaticism. To get there on time, Mortician Charles Bickford all but burns the wheels off his best hearse. Landowner Jason Robards, biting into every line like a hungry barracuda...
Reston is fully as ruthless as he is shrewd. Using a "periphery technique," he accumulates bits of information from various places, then confronts the primary source and tries to bluff the full story out of him. He is said to be the finest bluffer in Washington...