Word: poignant
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Flagstad was statuesque in the white robes of the Grecian queen, yet touchingly human at the same time. As always, her voice filled the cavernous Met with its thrilling power. But it was also rich with an expressiveness that seems to grow more poignant with the years. Tenor Brian Sullivan sang his role of Admetus powerfully, if not always as cleanly as the classical style demands. The staging was a trifle fussy, and the corps de ballet postured like so many figures on a Grecian urn. But alongside the triumphs of the performance, the defects were minor. Top honors: Kirsten...
...quite sure, but I think the answer lies in the fact that the movie lacks the lyrical streak of the novel. As it stands it is simply a sordid and weighty story of the racial injustice of South Africa. An excellent story, I hasten to add, but one so poignant that it needs relief of some sort. From the very beginning when the old native pastor sets off to seek his lost sister and son in the hellhole of Johannesburg, and through the whole story of his agonies on learning that his sister is a prostitute...
Still, The Best of the Best is a rich hoard of U.S. writing. Perhaps the one great story is Ring Lardner's Haircut, a caustic glimpse of small-town brutality; it gets better with each rereading. Close runners-up are Ernest Hemingway's My Old Man, a poignant report of a boy's affection for his father, a crooked jockey, and Wilbur Daniel Steele's How Beautiful with Shoes, an eerie description of a meeting between an imaginative lunatic and an inarticulate farm girl. Most notable contribution from the younger generation is Prince of Darkness...
...other times, the movie blunts poignant climaxes and fritters away mood. Thanks mostly to Playwright Miller, some of the play's power still courses through Death of a Salesman. From the Broadway cast, the film offers good performances by Mildred Dunnock as Willy's wife, Cameron Mitchell as his philandering son, Howard Smith as his envied neighbor. Kevin McCarthy, who played on the London stage the son who sees through Willy, does well in the same part...
Somewhat surprisingly, the stories about World War II flying make dull reading, perhaps because aerial combat had become so formalized that one account seems pretty much like another. But Editor Jensen has dug up two first-rate items for his closing sections. Someone Like You is a poignant sketch of battle fear by Roald Dahl, a onetime R.A.F. pilot. And in The Three Secrets of Flight, Wolfgang Langewiesche, a onetime test-pilot, offers a superbly lucid discussion of the psychological adjustments men must make to survive...