Word: rollicking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...woodwinds and thundering percussion, often wistful because of his tragic end; 3) Rip Van Winkle, a clever description of the Washington Irving tale, in which Rip whistles for his dog (which answers "Woof! Woof!"), watches the dwarfs play at ninepins, has a couple of drinks while the bassoons rollick, sleeps it off and then calls for his dog (no "Woof"); 4) The Albany Night Boat, mostly moonlight and summer, and a five-piece Dixieland band on deck; 5) New York, a one-minute explosion in which the percussionists and their public-service assistants beat, squeeze, crank, .crash and blow vigorously...
...pace; the moviegoer, continuously aware that the vehicle is trying to beat the clock, may begin to feel like getting out to push. At 119 minutes, this might have been a much better movie than it is at 109. Yet the direction, by Noel Langley, has a real Dickensian rollick, and the acting is stylish, if not brilliant caricature. James Hayter is a dear old tub as Pickwick; Nigel Patrick, as Jingle, makes a properly swagger cheapJack; and Comedienne Joyce Grenfell, as Mrs. Leo Hunter, the aristocratic wreck who holds the "literahry fawncy-dress breakfast," positively improves on the book...
This cheerful excuse for a plot is taken seriously by neither Sholom Aleichem nor his characters. What matters is the vivid parade of penniless producers, starving actors, shrewd sharpers and keen-witted kibitzers who rollick through the book. This volatile world often seems like something out of the merrier parts of Dickens: a director with three wives, a sentimental actress always in search of a husband, and harmless scoundrels who are never happier than when plotting to steal each other's prima donnas...
Whom jest had joined together, peevishness took 25 years to put asunder. In those 25 years, Gilbert & Sullivan filled the English theater with such rollick as it had scarcely known before. Pinafore, Patience, The Mikado, The Gondoliers and the rest were something new under the limelight: real comedy operas whose music, in its own fribble fashion, was better written than most of the "serious" stuff of its time, and whose plots and lines were among the cleverest on the contemporary stage. These were smash hits, and today, after more than half a century, they are fresh hits every time...