Word: prankishness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Stitches (ABC). Medical students inhabit a coed dorm in this comedy, which blends doctoring with prankish college enthusiasm...
...apparently gave him cause. Sexton was a demanding child, prankish and defiant. She grew into a beautiful young woman who enjoyed playing one boy off against another. In 1948 Anne, 19, eloped with Alfred ("Kayo") Sexton, a 20-year-old college student ("Dearest Momie and Daddie-I don't know how to begin this letter"). By 1957 Kayo was a traveling wool salesman and Anne had two young daughters and a bad case of the housewife blues...
...real. Dick and Jane pick only safe targets; they knock over a telephone company office and win a round of applause from the queue of bill payers. Briskly propelled by Director Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), they skim through their adventures as innocently as a pair of prankish collegians. The only laws they are unable to flout are the iron laws of comic contrivance. They must, it seems, receive an implausible invitation to a party at the offices of the firm that fired Dick, for only then can they get at a huge slush fund that rests...
...some spark of genuine humor amid all these outrageous contrivances. The screenplay is little help. It keeps turning up yokel lines like, "Paris - that's near Europe and Asia." Caan and Gould fall back on a series of frantic semaphores to the audience, calling attention to how adorably prankish they are being. Director Mark Rydell's notion of how to give shape to a scene apparently is to make it louder and faster. This does produce an occasional laugh, just as somebody pounding a piano with a baseball bat is bound to produce an occasional musical tone...
Basque warriors managed to keep successive invading waves of Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths and Franks out of their fastnesses in the Pyrenees, and they were the only tribe in Europe that ever defeated the Prankish King Charlemagne. A Basque independent republic flourished briefly in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, but Hitler's Stuka dive-bombers crushed it in the rubble of Guernica thus assuring the dictatorial control of all Spain by Franco...