Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Private Show. Underneath her New England reserve, Maggie Smith has a scintillating wit. Some ten years ago, when a radio commentator asked what she would do if she woke up in the White House, she twanged right back: "I'd go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I'd go home." She also nurses old grudges (e.g., the Smith vendetta against the promotion of Actor James Stewart to be an Air Force brigadier general), sometimes writes tart notes to erring constituents. She shuns the Washington social whirl, lives quietly in a three-apartment building in suburban Silver...
Danton Walker, Broadway columnist for the New York Daily News, was neither the first nor the best example of that vaguely journalistic genus, the gossipmonger. In his 23 years of reporting flack-work, rumor, trivia and hearsay, his wit was generally perishable, his essays at political thinking were often bottom drawer (Cuban Dictator Fulgencio Batista was "the most dynamic and forceful personality I ever interviewed"), his prophecies of events were mercifully forgotten, his items were usually inconsequential, though short enough to be mildly habit forming, like peanuts. But he was less given than his predecessors to malice in print...
...since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Their idea of a veterans' meeting is not to salute the flag and then sit down to play pinochle; they decide, with the help of an imaginative racketeer (Akim Tamiroff), to rob five Las Vegas casinos at the same time-to wit, when everyone in town is singing Auld Lang Syne on New Year...
...chops on waiters and in general playing themselves. The action, when it comes, is fast and foolish enough to make this one of the more entertaining films of a not-too-entertaining summer. The ending is clever, and what precedes it has a little of everything, including a little wit. There are square jokes for squares (Red Skelton, playing himself, is unable to cash a check) and Clan jokes for Clan fans (Sinatra, disguised in blackface, asks Sammy Davis Jr.: "How do you get this stuff off?"). And for students of the ridiculous, there is a memorable doctor...
Last week NBC met the problem more effectively than it has ever been met in the past, by applying the light wit and dry satire of David Brinkley, in easy converse with the world's most informed straight man, Chet Huntley...