Word: witting
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This provides formidable competition. Next to Rouault, Max Beckmann's strength, coherent though it is in both still life and portrait, becomes an inflexible and dry stiffness. Bradley Walker Tomlin's vivid pattern of color dabs appears insubstantial and weak. Even Miro's usual verve and wit fail to bring his Lasso to satisfying completeness. Yet, such free-swinging abstractions as Toti Scialoja's or Richard Diebenkorn's, have far less to say. Their absence of representational basis is perfectly acceptable but their lack of aesthetic articulation...
...like that. In early childhood, everyone's parents are taken for facts of nature; judgment or love or forgiveness may follow later, in a lifelong search for identity. In that sense Mary McCarthy's art-wearing no makeup here, and armed with little of her famous wit-contrives to make her apparently simple material the story of a search for herself...
...connects the ten playlets is both clever and amusing, but although the individual scenes are usually witty, they are nearly inherently dangerously repetitive. Schnitzler played with a good idea a bit too long. Yet despite the fact that even seduction is not infallibly theatrical, there is ample comedy. The wit and sparkle within Schnitzler's idea comes from the delicate linguistic flirting with sex, from the inevitable dimension of anticipation in each scene, from individual characterizations, and from the differences between seductions...
...impact. It is the tale of a feeble-minded old man and of the noose he hangs up for his prodigal son to hang himself with if he should return. The prodigal does return, but does not hang himself--which seems too bad, because his ironic old half-wit father has tied his hidden fortune to the far end of the hangman's rope. Why he should want to help his detestable son instead of killing him is unexplained, but he fails totally. So, in a most frustrating manner, do his son, his daughter, and her husband, in their attempts...
...atmosphere of bare tenseness and frustration is powerful and constantly well-organized by Richard Cattani, the director. Although he has a slight weakness for exaggerated effects, such as the sudden turning on and off of emotion in the half-wit's granddaughter, he is usually calmly imaginative. Such touches as the long pause when the brothers-in-law are left alone together and such tableaus as the final sunset scene are most effective...