Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Kronenberger slipped into his first aisle seat for TIME, and promptly panned Erskine Caldwell's Journeyman, a kind of illegitimate son of Tobacco Road. No other TIME writer has manned a single section over a comparable span or filled his post with equal wit, grace and distinction. He has been the delight of readers, the scourge of meretricious producers, and the despair of his fellow writers...
...first play, Jenny Kissed Me: "Leo G. Carroll brightens up Mrs. Kerr's play in much the same way that flowers brighten a sickroom." Then there was the hapless actor who was commended for "playing his role up to the hilt except that he had no sword." Wit can be instant wisdom. Kronenberger's first clever words on a playwright have often proved to be the last word in sound critical judgment, as when he wrote of Christopher Fry: "He is less in the world of people than in the world of nouns and metaphors...
...book of mine called This Way, Miss, I retold a story about Millionaire Otto Kahn and the hunchback wit, Marshall P. Walsh. The banker and the hunchback were walking along Fifth Avenue, and the banker, pointing to a Christian place of worship, said to the hunchback: "This is my church." The hunchback replied: "I thought you were a Jew." The banker said: "I was a Jew." The hunchback looked up at him, walked a few steps, stopped and looked up at the banker again and said: "You know, Mr. Kahn-I was a hunchback...
...first-class barroom talker, which Robert Ruark is, needs a knockabout past, a creative memory, sufficient humor to see the vanity of his inventions, and a delivery good enough to shield from his listeners the gravy stains on material, memory and wit. With this equipment, a talker who happens to be, say, a journalist, can Jang out a newspaper column for years in an average daily elapsed time of eleven minutes (so Newspaperman Ruark has coasted; one suspects the creative memory is an aid in recounting the feat). Or he can put together two volumes of yarns about his boyhood...
...until the hideous orgy of the goums, like a nice, country-faced, un-soaped soap opera. As such, it is nevertheless lively and diverting. Belmondo, who in Breathless emerged in one catlike bound as the French Bogart, here plays the polar opposite of that part and plays it with wit and sensitivity. And Loren, though hardly the woman Moravia had in mind, makes a superlative tigress. Cunning, selfish, sensual, ferocious and above all female, she leaps on her passions and tears them to spectacular tatters...