Word: witting
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Wilson himself is Labor's strongest asset. With his wit, unflappability and easy manner with voters in pubs as well as on podiums, the perpetually pipe-smoking Wilson, 54, stands in strong contrast to Heath, 53, a somewhat starchy bachelor with an uneven, often irritable manner. Opinion polls reflect Labor's edge. At week's end Labor led by as much as 5.5%, which would translate into about a 60-seat majority in the House of Commons...
...University of Chicago, like many another converted introvert, he woke up to performing. Wit is far more often a shield than a lance; " Mike set up a complex of defenses that (TM) made him the fastest tongue in the Midwest. The second fastest was a hostile = chick named Elaine May. It was love I at first fight. "Elaine held me like an autistic child," Nichols remembers. The child bride he had taken at 19 was cast off. Elaine became a surrogate, although, says Mike, "it was much too serious for marriage." And much too funny not to play...
...leaping from drab reality to poetic fancy to sheer incoherence, from self-analysis to baths of self-pity. In the process, Miss Gallant's book bounces from high comedy to low, from pure pathos to arch New Yorkerish chatter. But neither heroine nor style ever loses the sharp wit that provides both with rare bite and rarer balance...
Although the film is weak at its base, its superstructure is dazzlingly handsome. There are satiric scenes that for wit and impact are unmatched since Richard Lester's Petulia. One group-therapy session in a swimming pool, for example, does expertly in a fleeting interlude of screen time what the first minutes of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice tried and failed to achieve. Leo and Margaret are jumping nude up and down in a swimming pool, surrounded by dozens of other patients, all under the supervision of a benign instructor, who keeps chanting, "Reach out, stretch...
There are, however, some remarkable performances in The Landlord. Lee Grant and Bob Klein, as two members of Elgar's family, act with closely calculated wit and an eye for the tellingly ludicrous gesture. Diana Sands is lithe and musky as the former Miss Sepia. Best of all, though, is Beau Bridges. His peppy performance ranges widely between antic comedy and tough melodrama. He handles both with equal facility, as well as the subtler shadings in between. He is surely one of the very best young actors in films today, good enough to make The Landlord worth seeing. That...