Word: witting
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MARY POPPINS. Walt Disney's drollest film in decades has wit, sentiment, lilting tunes, and an irresistible performance by Julie Andrews as the proper London governess with a flair for magic...
judicial funds, including the pay of all federal judges and Government law yers. They transport federal prisoners (79,000 last year), serve all federal court papers, from jury notices to Supreme Court orders - a chore that often takes wit and wile. To slap a desegregation injunction on Alabama's well-guarded George Wallace, for example, one deputy marshal stowed away in the men's room aboard the Governor's plane. Marshals have been called upon to seize entire businesses, not to mention stolen art works and such other oddments as a shipment of "Helene Curtis Magic Secret...
...rules of the game, no one should expect much literary talent from a rock 'n' roll singer. Past disk heroes have not been known for wit, loquacity, or literacy...
...undergone major surgery. In a postscript to his play, Dürrenmatt wrote: "Nothing could harm this comedy with a tragic end more than heavy seriousness." Director Bernhard Wicki falls into that error, compounding it with a gimmicky screenplay. The eunuchs, the coffin, and much of the mordant wit are omitted, as is the wooden leg. The sex angle is fattened up with a juicy subplot. And to make the slow corrosion of conscience more graphic, the good burghers of Guellen struggle against the all-too-solid temptation of a flotilla of trucks-crammed with fancy clothes, TV sets...
Despite an occasional stab of wit, Bergman's portrait of the artist as the victim of his fickle followers and corrupt critics, if it is funny at all, is heavy, testy humor. Teeth clenched, he wields the apparatus of slapstick boldly, but draws neither laughs nor blood because his northern variations on 8½ do not lend themselves to pie-in-the-face comedy. Even the most accomplished cinema stylist can scarcely hope, perhaps, to be the Fellini of the frost belt and a Scandinavian Sennett at the same time...