Word: whacks
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...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...
...Show. Occasionally she sneaks off to visit her parents in Seattle (her father is assistant manager of a men's club). Her parents have watched her show only two or three times during the past year, and in all that time, the TV set has been out of whack-the vertical control is broken, and Dottie, as her baby sister puts it, "keeps flipping upward." One of these days, the elder Provines keep saying, they will have to have that set fixed. Meanwhile, the girl in the red swing just flips...
...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...