Word: witting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Becket is a cerebral film spectacle based on the play by Jean Anouilh, in which English history wars with an impudent Gallic wit. Director Peter Glenville has flung the drama onto the screen like a vast Bayeux tapestry, held fast with the lancet-sharp performances of Peter O'Toole as Henry II, England's first Plantagenet ruler, and of Richard Burton as the 12th century martyr Thomas Becket. Henry loved Becket, raised him to eminence as Archbishop of Canterbury, then lost his onetime friend in a struggle between church and state that ended with Becket's murder...
...even tries to match her hosts insult for insult. Hostess: "We thought all Americans were gangsters." Honey: "And we thought all Englishmen were gentlemen." She usually loses anyway because they merely enjoy her wit...
...wit and wiles, Honey is no match for the race she delineates as unparalleled "for growing flowers and withering people." The wistful cause of New World vulnerability, Author Dundy suggests, is not so much the thickness of the British hide as the thin ness of the American skin. Worse, however rudely and frequently repulsed in their efforts to join the club, Yanks won't take neau for an answer...
Gold Dust Twins. Bernstein had the very touch Zeffirelli needed to complete a chef-d'oeuvre: under his baton, Verdi's wit and whimsy seemed ironic and sharp. He brought modern accents and strong colors to the aerial delicacy of Verdi's score, and drove the Met's orchestra at a pace that left the superb cast flushed and breathless...
Novelist Benedictus, who had a solidly scandalous success with a first novel, The Fourth of June, about the seamier side of public-school life, unfolds his story with brevity and considerable wit. He has a fine comic flair for translating the mechanized absurdities of big-city life into visions of surrealist fantasy. But in the last chapters of You're a Big Boy Now, his story loses its fine farcical edge, and he makes the fatal mistake of taking his hero seriously. He would have done well to keep in mind a famous aphorism observed by Evelyn Waugh: "Never...