Word: smirk
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Manhattan's volubly witty Town Crier, the late Alexander Woollcott, had ten light literary fingers in a good many more pies, but what endeared him to his admirers was his habit of pulling out the juiciest borrowed plums in public with a happy little verbal smirk that meant: "What a smart boy am I." Last month he did it again (posthumously) in Long, Long Ago, a very satisfactory second course to his highly comestible While Rome Burns (TIME, March 12, 1934). Most of Wooll-cott's plums are still on the sugary side, but the best ones have...
Monty Woolley has doffed his smirk and wisecracking manner, but he's retained all his spark and individuality as the gruff title character of the "Pied Piper." The saga of one Englishman's battle to escape the rush of the Nazi armies through France, and of the waifs he picks up on his way, the "Pied Piper" is an original and highly effective film account of one of the dramatic episodes of this...
...public like Darby & Joan, behave in private more like Don Juan and Jezebel. The first half-in Maugham's typical drawing-room style-is a faintly nasty account of their infidelities, so carefully underlined that for a while it looks as if Theatre will be all smirk and no play. When the well of adultery runs dry, the authors rush with their buckets to the dripping fount of sentimental stage glamor: the star's dressing room on a great London first night, flowers, hubbub, reminiscing old doorman, tiff between actresses-and, in the midst of all this...
...circles by discreet fellow-traveling when that was fashionable. She made speeches for trade unions and took off her clothes for the Spanish Republic. More recently she has taken them off for France, Britain and the aluminum drive. Her publicity on these occasions has not been free of a smirk. Now the smirk is on the other cheek...
...first novel, 28-year-old Daniel Lundberg uses an idiom of his own. At once callow and articulate, it can make things seem simultaneously ridiculous and touching without showing a trace of the oldtime Tarkington smirk. It is the almost perfect tongue for the self-revelations of a Dedham high-school senior...