Word: slapdash
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Died. Sidney Arthur ("Sid") Field, 45, bulb-nosed British comic who soared to fame in wartime revues (Strike a New Note, Strike It Again); in Richmond, Surrey. Disdaining the fast gag, Field mixed the pathetic and the preposterous into an art reminiscent of Chaplin's, but with a slapdash gusto...
...himself, the story catalogues the rise to television fame of a comic who specializes in gag-stealing and belligerent self-interest, and stops at nothing to keep an audience laughing. The movie includes an endless parade of vaudeville turns with Berle running through his television repertory, throwing in some slapdash imitations of Ted Lewis, Al Jolson, Bert Lahr, et al. Though most of the skits are single-set affairs shot by a rigid camera, there is nothing static about the movie. Berle's heavy cavortings energize the screen like a buffalo stampede. The fact that his comedy...
...simplified his situations ("I hate messing around with complicated backgrounds"). Some up-&-coming Arno types: the chinless, chestless little husband, and the ferocious, terrapin-eyed old girl of 50 who admires ballplayers ("We do sell them sometimes, lady, but only to other teams"). Arno likes best the gagless, slapdash sketches of clowns and nudes with which he has padded out his book, even hopes to hang them in a "serious" one-man show later this season. But he admits that he finds his fans (and the editors of The New Yorker, where most of his work appears) unrelenting. "They have...
...Mississippi Novelist William Faulkner has published 18 books. Some of them (The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Intruder in the Dust) are among the best in 20th Century U.S. fiction; others, as might be expected from a man producing at Faulkner's rate, are inferior and slapdash. In the latter group is Knight's Gambit, a collection of six stories (a couple of them written for the Satevepost) more or less conforming to detective-story formulas...
...Hopper's hard comments on the loneliness and scantiness of a lot of city life-paintings that bite deeper than propaganda pictures of the "social-consciousness" school ever could. By contrast, Grandma Moses' glowing, not very "primitive" Out for the Christmas Trees and Louis Bouche's slapdash evocation of the New Lebanon Railroad Station, though just as true to American life, were as warm and easy to take as a sunshiny...