Word: wits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Almost certainly he is, so far as the box-office is concerned. Author-Director George Seaton has laced his sure-fire sentimentality with equally sure-fire wit and some cynical knowledge about how men of business and law might talk, look and act under these extravagant circumstances. The movie handles all its whimsy deftly and is consistently a smooth, agile...
...also preaches a strangely ambiguous moral. Kris Kringle inveighs against the commercialism which has perverted Christmas. But most of the wit and comedy in the show, all of the logic, and much of the sentiment, endorse the idea that faith, honesty, kindness, magnanimity and the innocence of the imagination are chiefly to be respected because no other kind of investment pays off a fraction so well, in hard cash and at the voting booths...
Sideline Seat. Nowadays, Columnist Rose is waist-deep in the fanciest possible metaphors. At its best, his talk combines the shriller styles of E. E. Cummings, a nightspot headwaiter, P. T. Barnum and a Polo Grounds peanut vendor. But he flavors this potpourri with a cynical wit. "What people don't seem to see," he complains, "is the Billy who sits on the sidelines and laughs at the game...
...like Hit Parade (see above), is a comedy about songwriters trying to get ahead. But Hit Parade, by telling its story simply and with humor, and giving a reasonable facsimile of how entertainment people look and feel, is fairly pleasant. Love and Learn by telling its story with tinny wit, and shoving its inert characters through tortuous farcical situations, is rather a bore...
...Prizewinner Van Wyck Brooks (The Flowering of New England) got a license at 61 to marry Gladys Rice Billings, 60, remote in-law of Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall. Songwriter Milton Drake (Mairzy Doats) was sued for a separation by his lamzy divey, Betty. Dorothy Parker, 53, most-quoted lady wit of the '303, was sued for divorce by Fellow Writer Alan Campbell, who complained that they had become strangers. And Mickey Rooney, 24, was sued for separate maintenance by wife Betty Jane (Miss Birmingham 1944), who said she was dissatisfied with her $10,000-a-year settlement after learning...