Word: witting
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Tall Story (Mansfield Productions; Warner), as a hit comedy (TIME, Feb. 9, 1959) written for Broadway by Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse, was constructed on the principle of the basketball. A variety of vapid college humors were compressed into an airtight container of cynical wit laced up with some penetrating moral strictures. Joshua Logan, who produced and directed this film version of the play, has managed with singular skill to peel off the wit and the penetrating remarks. What is left is rather difficult to describe, but it sure doesn't have much bounce...
There are a few flashes of wit ("Malraux is Hemingway grown up") and polemic ("the liberal temperament's besetting weakness is parochialism"). More typically, though, he writes of Thucydides n words that might have come from the Pentagon itself. Later he asserts that 'Tolstoy is a very large man. When we read him we too must enlarge ourselves." It looks like a very large 50 years for literature...
...Beverly Hills Hotel, flustering her own pressagents, for whom she has little need, and chattering over a beige-colored phone in her serviceable English and sparkling French. Her robust charm, the shaggy, Chablis-tinted hair over soft, wide-set eyes, and the generous mouth that twists with Gallic wit as the words come tumbling out, all add up to a sultry but utterly unphony femininity that makes her, at 39, far sexier than most of Hollywood's chromium-plated babes. She describes her own quality perfectly as she discusses Room at the Top, in which she brought calm skill...
Edna St. Vincent Millay-vied eagerly for the honor of contributing to his column. These guest appearances, combined with his own fey wit, earned him a tidy salary-at one time $25,000 a year-and a wide following. The Adams circle grew by millions after he joined radio's renowned Information Please quiz program in 1938, along with Clifton Fadiman, John Kieran and Oscar Levant...
...Oscar Wilde-though he did not share Oscar's homosexual bent-and the friendship bolstered his social success. It was a time when conversation was still considered a fine art, and Wilde and Harris were two of the greatest conversational artists in London, sought by hostesses for the wit and charm of their anecdotage...