Word: scripted
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...board. "President Johnson," said one, "announced late Sunday he has commissioned Artist Peter Hurd to paint a portrait of the Rev. C. P. Lewis." Hurd, of course, is the painter whose portrait of the President was rejected by L.B.J. as "the ugliest thing I ever saw." Improving on the script, Johnson last week chose as his 33rd wedding anniversary gift to Lady Bird a portrait of a boy titled Arturo by Henriette Wyeth, who is Mrs. Hurd...
What makes the screenplay really inferior is not its dialogue but its structure. To Breen's credit, he has spared no violence and omitted no possible crime; but the script completely lacks a sense of pacing (a lack that is suitably reinforced by director Douglas, and finalized in the cutting room). Following Sinatra's fast, complicated search for villains becomes practically impossible, because the leads from one day's work to the next are always contained in inaudible, or highly forgettable, bits of dialogue...
Moss extracts amazing performances from the two, sending them through the first act so breezily that the disease and terror which clank from the script are reduced to melancholy, and even that faded. It is worth purchasing a copy of the play to take the measure of their achievement. Miss Russell sustains a frantic levity, as though she shortly expected her limbs to drop off. Placed against this is Miss Cox's bitter rationalism, her consciousness that everything she does is correctly reasoned from false premises...
...script contains some of the best satire written in the last decade. "So That's the Way You Like It," a parody of Shakespeare, is extraordinary funny; The miner's soliloquy, too, is hilarious...
...Dunster show, despite occasional bright performances, manages to obscure much of the script's brilliance. Director Peter Schandorff allows his actors to telegraph each of the punchlines. This throws off the pace of the show so that, at times, the performance degenerates into a string of jokes--each followed by a blackout. His own smothering of the Lord Russell sequence is the best example of this...