Word: witting
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...others who consort to slow the pace are the butler (Prentice Claflin). Doctor Finache (David Wilkinson), and Antoinette the cook (Honor Moore). Claflin ranges about the stage, making himself disagreeable to the other characters and to us. Feydeau devoted at least several tablespoons of wit to the part, and Claflin ought to do better. Wilkinson's failure is difficult to explain. Physically he is suited to the part of an aging man of science and affair who still has an eye for the chorines. Unfortunately he is always a step or so behind the action, looking on but stepping aside...
...surprising that a first film should be influenced, and Hunter (who knows his Hitchcock and Welles very well) has had the wit to pick good models. I wonder, though, whether his larger view of human relationships and actions hasn't been over-determined by the number of movies he's seen. Is it intentional that the triangle of Cliffie, hero, and ellusive temptress so closely parallels the triangle in Vertigo? I suppose it is, but I can't help preferring the Hunter who very logically (and rather sweetly) sets the recently de-zombied roommate to opening a pile of mail...
Finley's hallmark is his verbal legerdemain. To wit...
...college professor and his wife Charlotte, who is one of those beautiful, charming, spontaneous nature girls so dear to the hearts of intellectual novelists. The sparse action is accompanied by heavy circular symbolism: the motorcycle wheels, the twister, Charlotte's abandoned whirling dance, bees circling around the half-wit in numbers that ought to discourage any rapist. In the end, the reader is left going around in circles...
Certainly it is more informative to quote him: passages plucked nearly at random demonstrate his quite unique blend of energetic wit and despair, the despair of a young man whose visions of darkness are constantly lit up by lightning-like storms of adrenalin...