Word: breathing
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...current off-Broadway production is breath-catchingly funny, surrealistic in tone and style and hair-trigger fast in pace. All this it owes to Director Alan Arkin. He shows such ready mas tery of comic tempo and zany action that Mike Nichols and Gene Saks might as well know that they have a competitor on their hands...
France, 1944. Hysterically, a German soldier tries to break the American sergeant's stranglehold. But there is no escape; the grip grows tighter until the soldier chokes to death. The sergeant releases his victim -and his own breath returns in a series of orgasmic spasms...
Thus might Johann Sebastian Bach and his family have celebrated Christmas nearly 250 years ago. In its joyous expression of a faith that was as natural as breath, that scene seems to be more than a millennium away from 1968, when the season celebrating the Saviour's birth is a time of commercial convulsion. Even many of those yearning for piety find Jesus elusive, a shadowy problematical name in history rather than a symbol of ultimate reassurance. Seen through the scrim of contemporary anxiety and unbelief, everything about the Bach-family Christmas seems to be a quaint anomaly...
...bombing halt, accompanied possibly by a ceasefire, in the immediate future." Then the thrust: "I am also told that this spurt of activity is a cynical, last-minute attempt by President Johnson to salvage the candidacy of Mr. Humphrey. This I do not believe." Making the accusation in one breath and disavowing it in the next, he made certain that the charge would be noticed...
...monster within the skin, he is something else. Under orders from some burning sector of his mind, he hysterically re-enacts one killing by wrapping his hands around an imaginary girl's windpipe. Hovering between pathos and terror, Curtis suddenly makes the viewer's breath stop in his own throat - and incidentally gives a glimpse of the picture that got lost somewhere between Boston and Hollywood...