Word: witnessed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...only newcomer to Nielsen's sacrosanct Top Ten this year. His canonization among the highly mortal immortals of TV has been a triumph-if that is the word-of manner. Ford has the warmth and expansiveness of a Baptist revivalist, some of the relentless cracker-barrel wit of an Alben Barkley or Will Rogers. No hayseed, he has parlayed his deep-dish Southern accent and soft, self-deprecatory ways into hard money. Says his manager: "He appeals to old people with his hymns and spiritual songs. He has a tremendous appeal to little youngsters because of the name Tennessee...
This provides formidable competition. Next to Rouault, Max Beckmann's strength, coherent though it is in both still life and portrait, becomes an inflexible and dry stiffness. Bradley Walker Tomlin's vivid pattern of color dabs appears insubstantial and weak. Even Miro's usual verve and wit fail to bring his Lasso to satisfying completeness. Yet, such free-swinging abstractions as Toti Scialoja's or Richard Diebenkorn's, have far less to say. Their absence of representational basis is perfectly acceptable but their lack of aesthetic articulation...
...like that. In early childhood, everyone's parents are taken for facts of nature; judgment or love or forgiveness may follow later, in a lifelong search for identity. In that sense Mary McCarthy's art-wearing no makeup here, and armed with little of her famous wit-contrives to make her apparently simple material the story of a search for herself...
...connects the ten playlets is both clever and amusing, but although the individual scenes are usually witty, they are nearly inherently dangerously repetitive. Schnitzler played with a good idea a bit too long. Yet despite the fact that even seduction is not infallibly theatrical, there is ample comedy. The wit and sparkle within Schnitzler's idea comes from the delicate linguistic flirting with sex, from the inevitable dimension of anticipation in each scene, from individual characterizations, and from the differences between seductions...
...atmosphere of bare tenseness and frustration is powerful and constantly well-organized by Richard Cattani, the director. Although he has a slight weakness for exaggerated effects, such as the sudden turning on and off of emotion in the half-wit's granddaughter, he is usually calmly imaginative. Such touches as the long pause when the brothers-in-law are left alone together and such tableaus as the final sunset scene are most effective...