Word: flowering
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...Cactus Flower. Humor is often the puckish shadow cast by national character. English comedy is a running display of oneupmanship, reflecting an indelible class system. The Teutonic cast-ironies of Brecht seem manufactured by Krupp. The classic American comic event is the chase, a drolly tangible version of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. And the French sex farce is logic run rampant, reason carried to an unreasonable and absurd extremity. That is why French sex farces are innately sexless: Descartes wrote them all. They begin with cogito ergo sum, and they rely not on seduction but sophistry...
...Cactus Flower is such a French farce, seasoned to U.S. tastes with local situation gags by Adapter-Director Abe Burrows, garnished with appealing humanity, and served with unerring timing by a well-chosen cast. Lauren Bacall plays a dentist's nurse who looks "like a big white Band-Aid," speaks with an antiseptic voice that would intimidate gangrene, and lives a prim life with mother. The dentist (Barry Nelson) holds a master's degree in bachelorhood, and while he appreciates spinsterish efficiency in the office, he turns for amour to a Greenwich Village post-adolescent (Brenda Vaccaro). This...
...friend whom she wishes to marry. This makes Vaccaro extravagantly solicitous: she must meet Bacall's supposed lover and see if he is a good sort. By the time the fictional couples are locked on a discotheque floor in the steely bonds of subterfuge, Cactus Flower is a prickly web of deceit. Inevitably, Bacall kicks over the old-maidenly traces and turns into a bewitching torso-twisting temptress, while the dentist drops his dentures...
...Cactus Flower is beguiling rather than robust. It skips a comic beat now and again, but it is watch-proof, an amusing way of forgetting time and not merely killing...
...difficult to imagine the man who wrote Billy-Club Puppet facing a firing squad. While Lorca's fame lies chiefly in his tragic plays and his poetry, Billy-Club Puppet is a gay little fantasy, modeled on the puppet theatre, and as innocent as a flower...