Word: tales
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...something longer, headier, woozier-such as the tale of a small Dylan accompanying a busload of revelers on a daylong ride from one pub to another, till "dusk came down warm and gentle on thirty wild, wet, pickled, splashing men without a care in the world at the end of the world in the West of Wales"-that Williams gathers more momentum and garners a real harvest of laughs...
...reason in The Egghead is a matter of plot. Basically-with its tale of a cocksure know-it-all who is being royally had and is only saved by his bird-brained wife (Phyllis Love)-the plot is a staple of artificial comedy and farce. But here the tricks and artifices are applied, with considerable loss in credibility, to something serious and real. Moreover, as anything but a purely comic butt, the professor seems just a little too wet behind the ears and behind the times...
...dialogue which accompanies these events shows a few infrequent flashes of wit, but for the most part vacillates between the dull and the incredible. "The legend of the Raintree is the age-old tale of man's quest for the unattainable.... It is the very tree of life to him who finds it. Its ways are the ways of pleasantness and its paths all lead to peace, to happiness, to the secret of life itself." The actors deserve no little credit for making this sort of twaddle sound much less unlikely on the screen than it looks in print...
...Royal Ballet's performances were worth seeing for the quality of the soloists if not for the imagination of the choreographers. But as always, the company was at its best in the familiar pageantesque fairy-tale fare-Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty-and in a revised and turbulent Petrouchka. Fonteyn & Co. still moved with a cool and stately charm unmatched by any other ballet group seen in the U.S. That seems to be more than enough for U.S. audiences; half a million people who will see the Royal Ballet during its present tour have already bought more than a million...
...apricot-haired English comedienne, with tongue-in-jowl introductions by husband Charles Laughton. The selections range from Fiji Fanny, a raucous burlesque of the songs the trade calls "grass-skirt numbers," to a haunted, spine-crawling ditty titled If You Peek in My Gazebo, which tells the tale of a mad New England spinster who sits each evening in a summerhouse on the hill secretly watching the lusty young village bucks stroll...