Word: clowning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Nabokov's ultimate and realistic irony is to make the executioner, who is at first passed off as just another fellow prisoner, into a garrulous, sentimental clown. As the axman prattles on about being not some "unfamiliar terrible somebody, but a tender friend," Author Nabokov develops the memorable conceit that the rite of execution is both a public festival and a black sacrament, in which victim and executioner are as intimately linked as bride and groom...
...Actress Bergner with the kind of virtuoso acting opportunities she needs. With top-notch support from German Actor Otto Hasse as Shaw, Bergner limns the famous affair-by-letter, beginning in 1912, when Actress Campbell, at the height of her fame and beauty, was writing to her "Joey the Clown" about appearing in his Pygmalion, through the declining days in Hollywood (where Stella was like "some sinking frigate firing broadside after broadside at anyone who tried to help her"), to the year before Stella's bitter, poverty-stricken death in a Pyrenees village in 1940, when the 83-year...
...sneak preview of this film at a Manhattan movie theater, a woman in the roped-off guest section raised her voice in the dark to cry: "Good heavens, how could Hank have accepted such a role?" There on the screen, prancing awkwardly in mandarin robes, flamenco suits, a clown costume, a silly goatee, was Henry Fonda in the role of Willie Bauché, Hollywood producer-director-writer-actor and the most elaborate phony since the big bad wolf...
...couple of high-school-level musical numbers. But in the skits he triumphed with his marvelously mobile face, his adaptable voice (he started in radio 17 years ago on a serious news show, impersonating Churchill and F.D.R.) and the conscientiousness about being funny that marks a major clown...
Sharp Answers. But Nikita Khrushchev was gaining understanding of a sort. He threw himself into his answers; he never faltered in setting down the Soviet line. He demonstrated clearly that he is no clown, although he knew how to draw a laugh when he wanted one. He stumbled-perhaps artfully-half a dozen times. Once he apologized for accidentally calling U.S. newsmen "comrades," once referred to the tenth anniversary of the revolution in "America" when he meant China. When he was asked about his celebrated "We will bury you" gibe at the U.S., Khrushchev explained calmly that capitalism was doomed...