Word: witting
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...what you will against Hitler, but he could have taught producer Lew Grade and director Franklin J. Schaffner a thing or two about captivating an audience. He would have told them that manipulation requires careful pacing, a dash of wit, and a lot of fervor. You've got to work and keep working, he would have said--you can't be sluggish or cowardly. It's all right to be simplistic and to prey upon people's most basic fears and desires, and it helps to be as perverse and merciless as possible, but you've got to have charisma...
Schaffner's direction has no charisma, no wit, little skill. With the exception of the obvious, lowangle shots of Gregory Peck as the evil doctor, his camera set-ups are standard and static, the editing choppy and unrhythmical, the use of select German symphonies and thundering crescendos at the sight of Peck ludicrous. The pace is non-existent until the last twenty minutes, a bloody brawl between Peck and Laurence Olivier as an old Nazi-hunter, when it may be labeled "slow." The old men resort to biting each other, and the graphic shredding of Olivier's ear and Peck...
...countless red-and-white lobster pots from which he has, over the years, extracted a fortune worth a couple or three million dollars. Craggy-faced, silver-haired, attractively beefy, Duryea reminds you of a fine old patrician gentleman: so much money and style, and so little of the incisive wit or brilliance that might scare off the natives. He speaks the language of the east, which is to say he pronounces his words with a heavy Republican accent, and with the marked deliberation of a man who is either sagely cautious or just plain slow. No one is quite sure...
...LeBoutillier has to write about Harvard as a liberal/radical enclave, he could at least do it with virulence (a la Joe McCarthy's speech about "the Kremlin on the Charles") or with wit and style (a la William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale). Instead, he loads us down with sixth--grade platitudes and an embarassing series of distortions...
...answers, which varied, were often attended by boos, hisses, and laughter, depending on the candidate's wit and politics...