Word: tactfulness
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...summer of 1955, the President, fishing and golfing in Colorado, suffered the first of his heart attacks but recovered quickly. Less than a year later, in June 1956, he was stricken again, this time with ileitis, which required major surgery. To his credit, Nixon, then Vice President, responded with tact and humility in a situation that might have stopped other men. After two such illnesses, it seemed impossible that Ike would run for reelection. But he did. "I want to finish what I have started," he said. On the eve of election, he was confronted with two simultaneous crises...
Amid rigged climaxes and sobbing violins, Smith acts Miss Brodie with tact and subtlety. But even profound craftsmanship cannot create sympathy. From the opening it is clear Miss Brodie is a petty self-deceiver and the fabric of her life is threadbare and shabby. The rest of the film is only variations on a seam. "A guid beginnin' makes a guid endin'," her class is informed. Aye; if only the revairrse did not hoold as well...
Noon and Night play it safer and softer. Terrence McNally redoes French farce à la Grove Press in a play where all the vice is versa. A heterosexual is mistaken for a homosexual, a pair of mild Babbitts turn out to be, in tact, sadistic leather fetishists, a droning housewife is an aspiring nymphomaniac. After a number of legitimate laughs, McNally tries to be momentous in a conclusion about the necessity of love, but that message is articulated every week on Laugh-In: "Whatever turns you on . . ." Night is by Leonard Melfi, considered one of off-Broadway's emerging...
First Novelist Kellogg, 46, succeeds most of the time by means of firm tact and dry-eyed restraint. Her characterizations are neither bathetic nor sensationalized. Whenever the book begins to soften into sentimentality, which is a little too often, she flashes a cauterizing wit. She also resists the temptation to moralize. The common humanity of her people reveals itself indirectly, through their power to stir other lonely beings whose disfigurements are merely emotional. Arthur's death after his brief romance with Junie is rather predictable, and the ending is too pat. But Miss Kellogg displays an easy, lightly satirical...
...enters upon her own appraisal of adultery, then apologetically backs off ("Everyone seems to do it now. I wonder hey don't call it something else"). Settled in Chambers ends up tamely with all the conventional comedy answers and one big question: What lace-curtain gentility, what damnable tact keeps lonor Tracy from finally ripping through? The book earns its solid quota of middle-volume laughter, but its uthor remains cursed by an un-Irish 'emon of cautious restraint...