Word: whack
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that she is the daughter of a slave woman, but that the plantation and she herself with it are being sold for taxes. Soon Amantha (Yvonne De Carlo in the movie) is trembling on the block at a slave auction. A lounging lecher decides to examine the goods, when whack!-a silver-headed cane smashes his wrist. The hero (Clark Gable) pays $2,000, and takes Amantha off to his manor house...
...Green Mare (Zenith-International) is what happens when the French take another whack at Fanny. Like that famously funny film first made by Marcel Pagnol, The Green Mare is a comedy of barnyard humors adapted from a ribald but rusé ironic novel by Marcel Aymé. Regrettably, Director Claude Autant-Lara lacks both Pagnol's touch and Aymé's intensity. The Green Mare ain't what she used to be. Nevertheless she is, as the French say, green-which means, as the Americans say, blue. The plot, for example, involves a Rabelaisian family feud...
Work begins slowly. The men lounge in corners, chatting about home and family, pinching the waitresses as they arrive. Slowly the tempo of preparation rises. Cleavers whack, pots rattle, steam billows up. Jokes and insults fly like salt and pepper; the chef gives the back of his nasty old tongue to a cook caught pilfering a pullet; the broiler man tips a pot of boiling water off a rack and-YEEEOOOWWW...
Brant can still whack out a crackling paragraph in the style of his old newspaper days. But in his sixth volume, as in the previous five, he smothers this talent by his pack-rat compulsion to drag in everything pertaining to Madison and his times, no matter how deadening it may be. Even so, the main weakness of his final book is Madison himself, who was far too small a man for the heroic role that Brant would have him play. At times, in fact, even Author Irving Brant seems to forget about little Jemmy, as page after page goes...
...sound of a belching baby for fear that it might offend potential customers, and he ruled out frying bacon and tooth brushing as not sufficiently dramatic. But he hopes soon to record an aerial dogfight between two World War I relics, the crash of a sprung gallows trap, the whack of a guillotine blade against the block. And his enduring dream is to catch on his own high-fidelity equipment the mid-century's ultimate sound-an exploding hydrogen bomb...