Word: wittedly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Awesome to fellow zanies is Allen's ability to concoct his own jokes. Most of them depend on gagmen for their wit. Allen writes much of his show himself, decisively edits the contributions of his two assistant scripteurs. Practically unchanged this season will be the formula that carried his program along on NBC. In his dry, unhappy, singsong drawl, Allen will still handle 60% of the dialogue, manage, between musical pauses, to give his own news of the week, interview unexpected guests, preside over the dramatic doings of the Mighty Allen Art Players. For his famed ad libs...
...gusto and wit of the true picaresque fill Clyde Brion Davis' recent Sullivan (Farrar & Rinehart; $2.50), though it is less original than his The Anointed (1937). Gilbert Sullivan (whose middle name was not "&") leaves Chicago to wander through Texas, Mexico, California with a rogue who gathers funds for a monument to the "martyred" Judas Iscariot. Sullivan's obsession is that he can float through the air by expanding his body cells. On an eerie Pacific beach he makes a brief will-powered flight, dismisses his talent for political reasons...
...Stayed for Breakfast," variation allegro on the Ninotchka theme, casts McIvyn Douglas as the party-liner seduced by the very un-proletarian charms of Loretta Young. Catching the flavor of a Paris that is no more, the film combines the wit of the French with the crackling pace of the American movies. But indeed ironic is the script's playful treatment of a political force which contributed so much to the downfall of that Paris which it eulogizes...
...sleek, striped trousers, spade-tailed coat, pince-nez on a wide black ribbon. His speeches were orations, models of polysyllabic splendor. He described himself as a "veritable peripatetic bifurcated volcano in behalf of the principles of my party." But meatily between the thick-hunked verbiage were sandwiched slices of wit and wisdom. He was one man who dared to tackle rough-&-tumble Huey Long in debate on the Senate floor. He left the Kingfish lacerated, pop-mouthed, speechless...
...into a country bumpkin with an odd flair for bright comedy. His hesitant romance and marriage with Actress Linda Paige (Rosalind Russell) becomes a slapstick backstage burlesque containing the only fun in the film. From then on Epstein gets tangled with Behrman in a confusing hodgepodge of drawing-room wit heavily weighted with dramatic overtones...